Over the course of the last 4 weeks, I've now listed a lot of items (is 17 a lot?) on Amazon's Marketplace and actually sold 2 of them.

Since organizing the garage, I have seen that I have a lot of stuff (aka crap) that could be saved for my kids to play with, or I could sell the stuff now and buy new stuff when the kids are older.

 

I have big tubs of baseball cards, some of which are unopened boxes.

I still have about 9 long boxes of comics, most of which are not bagged or boarded.

I have "collectible" action figures a la 40-year-old Virgin unopened.

 

Maybe this is the long-sought rehabilitation of my pack-ratty ways??

 

I never did get comfortable with that eBay thing. I think there's something to be said for fixed-price sales versus auctions.

 

update: This is a link to my seller profile and another link with my referrer tag in it for your convenience

 http://www.amazon.com/seller/yourbuyingbuddy

 

 I decided on how I want my quad to look, software-wise.

 

I'm installing XPSP2 32-bit on the C: drive first. Drivers are updated, Windows Updates are installed.

 

Next, I intended to install Vista Ultimate 64-bit side-by-side on C:, however I am finding out that Vista doesn't like that. It wants to elbow XP out of the way and take all of C: for itself.

 

So, I will have to bust out my handy Partition Magic CD or backup-repartition-restore my XP install to subdivide the space on the Raptor HD. I have two other physical HDs in this system, but I've partitioned them Dynamic, so I can't install an OS to them.

 

Or, I may just be lazy and never install Vista 64-bit on my system. It's meant for gaming after all, and Vista is acknowledged as being suboptimal for gaming. The only thing Vista has that XP doesn't have is DX10, and nothing available today requires DX10.

 

*sigh*

The last pieces of my new gaming rig arrived last Friday, the 27th. Of course I then spent the entire evening til 3am assembling it!

 

Specs:

Antec Sonata case (carried forward)

MSI P6N-SLI motherboard (new)

Intel Q6600 Core 2 Quad CPU (new)

4GB PC2-8500 RAM (2@ 1GB sticks of Crucial Ballistix and 2@ 1GB sticks of OCZ SLI) (rebates bring it down to <$50/GB)

EVGA 8800 GTS 320MB Superclocked edition (new)

74GB Western Digital Raptor 10,000 RPM HD (picked up on close-out from BestBuy)

2@ 250GB WD SATA (drives from Fry's that have been sitting in my closet)

 

WinSAT memory score: 5.3 with 4GB installed, 5.0 with either the OCZ or the Crucial RAM installed. Everything else is all 5.9's WTF?!?!)

 

I'm running 32-bit Vista Ultimate on it right now, but will probably end up running 64-bit Vista Ultimate at some point. 32-bit Windows means that I have to live with RAM wastage. Only 3071MB show up as usable out of 4096MB total.

 

Since it's a gaming rig, I'll definitely be running WinXP on it, as a dual-boot or similar.

 

None of the cabling is dressed neatly, or tied down. It's a minor nest in there already.

 

With all 4GB installed, I'm having lockup issues. I removed 2GB and it seems stable again. I'll have to run the Prime95 stress tests to see what might be causing this problem.

 

I'm so excited, I can hardly contain myself!