Well, after a year of experimenting with using a Bluetooth headset on my primary desktop, Fozzie, I've come to a conclusion -- the technology isn't quite there yet. Even after adjusting to ensure line-of-sight with the receiver, the sound quality was never consistently good enough to rely on. When it was good, it was really good. But when it was bad -- it was horrible. So that headset now will become solely for cell phone use, where it seems to work perfectly fine. But not with a computer.

So, after re-evaluating all of my options for headsets, I've decided that I still believe the previous configuration to be the best. That is, a good mobile phone headet connected via a Radio Shack headphone/speaker switch that allows mobile phone headsets to connect to a PC. And after re-evaluating mobile phone headsets for this purpose, I've similarly decided that headset I used to use is still the best available -- a Plantronics MX-505. Currently my old headset and switch are being successfully used on my wife's computer, Clementine, so I've acquired a second Radio Shack switch (hard to come by now, they're no longer manufactured) and a second Plantronics MX-505 headset, this time in black.

Waldorf got a new keyboard -- a Microsoft Wired Keyboard 500. It's a pretty nice keyboard, simple, but effective. It's wired because this particular computer has no need for wireless peripherals, and the addition of batteries would really just be detrimental. And the keyboard is simple, no LCD screens or multitudes of media buttons which no one would ever use. Just a good, soft-touch, quiet, keyboard. Which is surprisingly hard to find nowadays.

This replaces a generic Compaq keyboard, which dates back to the earliest days of Fozzie (1999!). In addition to just being generally old, the keys were starting to lose responsiveness. I think it's understandable that it started to die after almost 10 years of use.

This keyboard marks one of the last components of Waldorf that can be upgraded without a major renovation -- everything else is tied to the motherboard in one way or another. This computer was originally built from parts cycled out of Fozzie, and I have been systematically upgrading all of the individually replaceable parts ever since. Now we're at the point where the next step will be to renovate the remaining parts of the computer -- motherboard, CPU, PSU, case, video card, and memory.

Got a new monitor for Clementine -- a 19-inch Samsung SyncMaster 940BX. Great monitor: 1000:1 contrast ratio, adjustable height, and can be rotated.

Attentive readers may remember that this is actually the same monitor I added to Fozzie back in December 2006. Even over a year later, I still couldn't find a better monitor than this, particularly at this price point. I didn't start out saying that I was going to get the same monitor, but after looking at all of them, this one still won.

It's also worth noting that this replaces a Samsung SyncMaster 570VTFT that Clementine was using. Before Clementine, this monitor was used with Fozzie, and was in fact the first LCD monitor I acquired, back in July of 2001. I am amazed at how well this monitor has held up over time. Other than being a slightly small 15 inches (which is still a common size), it has otherwise been great monitor to use over the years. That monitor -- and the 4 subsequent Samsung monitors I've purchased -- has made me a big Samsung fan. I'm continually impressed with the quality of their monitors. 5 LCD monitors and no dead pixels!

Fozzie just got a Christmas upgrade -- a new Seagate Barracuda SATA 120GB hard drive, to replace the existing Maxtor 80GB drive.

This serves as my secondary hard drive; it only stores my user data. That's why it is smaller than the other hard drive, which is 250 GB. I need to be able to back up my secondary drive onto my primary drive, so my primary drive needs to be big enough to hold both the contents of the secondary drive as well as the operating system and applications. So, when I upgrade my primary drive, I can buy one as big as I want. But when I upgrade my secondary drive, I have to keep it smaller than the primary drive.

The biggest reason for doing this upgrade at this time was that I plan on renovating Fozzie again sometime this summer. When I do so, it's quite likely that whatever motherboard I end up buying will only support one IDE channel (2 devices), as IDE is being phased out. My current board supports 2 IDE channels (4 devices), and my existing setup was 1 SATA hard drive, 1 IDE hard drive, and 2 IDE optical drives. So, I felt it would be prudent to replace the IDE hard drive with a SATA drive, so now I only have 2 IDE devices.

I'm very impressed with this new drive. Yes, it's bigger (120 GB vs. 80 GB) and faster (SATA vs. IDE), but what really impresses me is how quiet it is. As I soon I turned my computer on for the first time with this drive in, I instantly noticed that the noise level had dropped dramatically. I assumed that my older drive was causing some noise, but not nearly as much as it actually was. And I always like to make computers as quiet as possible, so that's a great benefit.

Ever since I got a Bluetooth adapter for Fozzie, I've been interested in trying to use a Bluetooth headset with my computer. So, I recently decided to go ahead and try it out. After reading tons of reviews of headsets online, it was clear that the universally best reviewed headset was the Plantronics Voyager 510. No other Bluetooth headset had anywhere near the positive feedback that it did. So, it was the obvious buy.

I'm happy to say it works great with my computer (and with my cell phone, too!). One change I had to make was that I needed to move the Bluetooth dongle from the back of my computer to my desktop, using an extra USB extension/stand that I have. It seems that line of sight is very critical to Bluetooth working correctly, especially for real-time audio. But once that change was made, the audio is very clear in both directions, and I have continued to reduce wires!

With this change in place, I was able to move my existing headset setup (a wired Plantronics MX-505 and Radio Shack speaker/headset switch) to Clementine, which had lacked a headset. That's still a pretty recent headset model, I only got it about a year and a half ago.