Category: 
August 25, 2006
Finally got the stupid desktop computer working! Tim would be so proud of me. I dragged the bloody bastard into work and started tinkering with it, complaining and swearing profusely that it didn’t work, plugged in the power and wham bam thank you maam the stupid thing worked.
Don’t you hate when things like that happen? I liken that to tinkering with something, then calling tech support only for them to ask you the dreaded question “Did you restart it?” and you sheepisly lie and say yes while you reach for the restart button. And you have to quietly tell them that for some reason it is all of a sudden working (or you simply pretend the connection went bad and hang up). Makes you feel about 2 inches tall. This coming from the girl with her MCSE.
Seems that the Radeon Sapphire graphics card that I had on my previous motherboard is not supported on the new ASUS motherboard. That is pretty poopy and means that I have to invest in yet another piece of hardware.
The other issue was that Windows XP was having a heck of a time trying to boot. It was stuck in this endless loop of asking me if I wanted to boot in safe mode and then restarting and asking me the same stupid question. An experience that reminds me of that old Polish ping pong joke - see other side > see other side < see other side. So then I had to boot with a Linux CD, mount the drives, copy all my crap from my c: 30 gig harddrive onto the d: 120 gig drive.
After the fun Linux party, I went down to my favourite lunchtime geek spot - Yo Yo Tech - off of Tottenham Court Road and purchased a shiny new 200 gig SATA Hitachi harddrive. Sweet jesus. I still think about the excitement of my 1.2 gig harddrive and now I'm onto 320 total gigs on my machine. Whodathunk it possible?
Came back to the office, installed it and booted up some janky copy of XP to get the installation going. And now it is all complete. The new PC is ready to go home to its little corner of my room to live its life serving my geeky needs. I think I shall name it Mini Me (pinky finger to mouth).
Final spec for the new computer
Motherboard: ASRock 775i65GV
Processor: 3GhZ Intel Pentium
Harddrives: 120 gig IDE Western Digital, 200 Gig Sata Hitachi
DVD Writer
Memory: 2 gig DDR Dimm
17″ flatscreen monitor wall mounted for my movie watchign pleasure
New black and silver case ala eBay
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Computers rock, especially when they’re fighting you. Fighting back is kinda fun, even for hours sometimes, but I got fed up once and had to lay down the ultimate smackdown. I can’t really confess in an open online forum, though, but it was funny as frickin’ hell, especially how I confessed it to my boys at work the next morning. All I can say is that it was along the lines of me once saying “we shoulda went to jail that night”, and Nick replying, “we did!”. Outta control youthful indiscretions, sometimes real outta control.