Amazon MP3 Downloads

So, you say that you want an alternative to iTunes...Well, the Amazon MP3 store is a good choice...scratch that...it is a great choice. They have agreements with the major labels that bring you what you like. In fact, every Friday this May, check out the site for special $5 offers on select albums...Listen to some selection below, or check it out for yourself...

XP SP3

OK, so I debated whether to post this or not since I do not have complete specifics or have figured out why XP SP3 would actually slow down our machine...We recently reinstalled everything from the original install disks and went through the painstaking process of updating to SP2 and the various updates over the last 2-3 years or so...It would boot up very quickly...In fact, it was so quick, I thought we did something wrong in the installation and it would crash at any time...It has been running strong for a few months now...that is until we updated it to SP3...

The install took about 10 minutes and it rebooted. The first boot took longer than our newer Vista Machine which has enough extras on it to choke a rather small whale...After logging in completely, we shut down, waited a few moments, and rebooted again. Boot time still three times as long, and the start-up programs like Windows Live OneCare, LogMeIn, and Orb took at least double the previous time to load. The machine is even slow starting IE...

Now, I know that this 6-year old, P4 1.80GHz with 768 MB of RAM, running XP Home is not the fastest or the best machine out there...this is why we use it as the media server and backup machine...but, it was quick and clean before XP SP3...I have deactivated some items in the startup, but annoying would be a kind word to use for this update...I just hope it is more secure or has other features we are missing...

I will post more as we find out more. Good luck with the update...Enjoy...