NP: The Boondocks

Okay, tonight I'm testing a new theory in the apparently never-ending quest to fix my desktop PC. I've disabled my CD-RW/DVD-R drive based on the fact that the MP3s I ripped recently sound like absolute garbage and I can't seem to burn anything. I can say with reasonable certainty that two of the programs that crap out on me (iTunes and Picasa) watch the drive for files they can use. AVG might look at that drive during a full scan as well. So we'll see if I can leave the machine up and running for at least a couple of days and not hang on the nightly virus scan.

Wish me luck. And as I pointed out to Phineas, all of these problems seem to be purely hardware related, so the "buy a Mac" argument loses a little bit of force. Of course, I suppose that if I had a Mac, I could have ruled out all of those driver and IRQ possibilities way beforehand.

The one major annoyance here is that I raised this possibility with the folks who built this piece of crap, and they talked me out of pursuing it, thinking it was unlikely.