NP: The Police, Message In A Box (CD)

I have this thing about needing to know how the other half lives. To that end, I have a nominal AOL account that, among other things, allows me to hang on to NotAbbott as my AIM screenname and check in on how things work on AOL.

So anyway, the whole massive reformatting of my computer project sorta wiped any AOL client from my PC. I've been moving a bunch of recurring charges off of one of my credit cards, and there's no way to change billing info for AOL through the web interface that I've found. So I had to install the latest and greatest, version 9.0, and I guess I can't be surprised that setting any kind of defaults to minimize the program's footprint is difficult at best.

During the course of the operation, I once again realized that under XP, sometimes the on/off button on my computer doesn't work. This seems really, really strange. It's hardware. How does the OS fuck that up?

Anyway, now I seem to have the AOL thing under control. And the networking thing. As far as I can tell, it was a USB 2.0 wireless adapter on a USB 1.1 port under XP that was the fatal combination, although it might just be a difference in default settings between the two ports. Since it works now, I'm not inclined to look at it any further.

Next up is CD burning. Works with RealPlayer, doesn't work with iTunes. This is another one I suspect is tangentially related to the ZIP drive, apparently even when unplugged. Although I didn't get the "serious error" or the blue screen of death and spontaneous reboot when I finally unplugged it.

It has been suggested that, since I get in so many fights with this computer, that I should break up with it. Except that new PCs expect you to spend a lot of money on them before they'll go home with you.