Yay for new technology

I just bought a new pc.

Or, I should say I just ordered the parts for a new pc.
That's right, I'm building one.

There's nothing really wrong with my old one. Mostly. It's three years old, so the hardware's decent. However, there is something strange happening with it, and as nerdish as I am I can't figure out what's wrong.

Here's the issue: I was having some video issues. Everything would work fine, but the quality was sub par. So I decided the first thing to try was to update the driver. That fixed the issue and everything looked stunning.

BUT...

After that, most videos wouldn't play. Any mpg, avi, mpeg or wmv would freeze the system and shoot the cpu usage to 100% and stay there. I had to shut it down by the task manager each time. Strange thing is, Flash players played fine. I could play flv files flawlessly. At that point I tried to roll back the drivers, at one point even uninstalling the video card and reinstalling. The old drivers wouldn't work and the system only recognized it generically and used the XP native drivers. I reinstalled the new drivers and once again, it looked wonderful but videos wouldn't play. I gave up, and decided to use it as an excuse to get a new one.

I'll still have my current pc, and I'm sure I'll dink with it until I get it to work. My current secondary computer will be reformatted and donated somewhere.

It still makes me cringe to spend that much money on something. But my justification is that I'm spending as much as I did for my tv.

I'm such a geeky tech whore.