it's late, and i'm a dork again

tonight i post a bunch of tech dork stuff, so i apologize in advance for anyone who intended to read something cool or see pictures of my cat and dog...

a couple of years ago i bought a Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop. it worked fabulously for quite a while, but has always run kind of hot (i don't know if you'd want to have it sit on your lap, it's a little warm for that). in recent months, it's been having SERIOUS problems overheating and i knew that i'd have to gut it and clean it all out - for anyone who's been considering doing that with their dell inspiron laptop, check out Dan and Sherree's site for great step-by-step instructions with photos. i will emphasize that you READ ALL OF THE COMMENTS before you open yours up and start fucking around. when i took out my fan/heatsink assembly, it pulled the CPU out as well, and when i put it back together the laptop wouldn't reboot. long story short, there's a little screw you have to turn to lock/unlock the CPU. you can take it out while it's locked, but putting it back in won't work so good. and if you bend the pins on the cpu, you're screwed.

i've also been testing out Internet Explorer 7 for the last while. while it seems to have some more gooder security features built into it, i haven't done anything dipshitty enough to warrant those security features actually working. the good news though, is that the look of it is much (much) nicer than IE 6 - more streamlined and easy to use - and TABBED BROWSING!! finally, IE has stepped into the 21st century and allows people to look at multiple web pages without getting lost in a flurry of windows creating the ultimate alt-tab nightmare. finally, ctrl-t has opened up a world of easy to use browsing techniques. oh, and it has RSS support - which is wonderful and about frickin time. i mean seriously, how hard could it possibly be to build in something to read a technology called Really Simple Syndication? well, it's there now. the down side so far? first of all, there's no AdBlock plugin. i've been using it on FireFox for so long that i'd almost forgotten what banner ads looked like. secondly, some websites don't recognize it as the next generation of IE. my bank's website told me i couldn't use this browser to do some shit because it wasn't IE6 or Netscape (though it seems to work in FireFox just fine). all in all, it hasn't crashed or been as buggy as FireFox has been off and on, but the lack of the AdBlock plugin on its own is enough to steer me away from using it as my regular surfer, just a nice alternative.

sorry for the dorkaration there. figured it write about that junk just because i can.

oh, and still lots of time to sign up for the Untastic Music Swap. I'm probably going to wait until next week to actually start the swapping process (when Cuppojoe comes back from holiday), so sign up. keep in mind - it doesn't matter what type of music you listen to, or where you live. just sign up and you'll get something in the mail that's not a bill.