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Putting it all together
Jan. 7th, 2002 05:06 pmSo, me and Mike got Hugh a new graphics card for Christmas, and Dad got him a flatscreen monitor. And he puts them all together and they work fine.
But this isn't good enough for Hugh. No, he needs a new hard disk as well. So he goes out and buys one, and it's damned cheap too (40Gig for less than £100 sounds ludicrous to my ancient mind, which still thinks in megabytes). He takes it home and plugs it in.
It doesn't work.
So he tries it in all it's combinations and permutations.
It doesn't work.
So he takes it back to the shop, and before changing it, they try it out.
It works.
Which means it must be his motherboard which doesn't like it. So I go over on Saturday and with SiSoft Sandra discover that his motherboard is an ancient Jetway Ali chipset (where ancient means it's from the last millenium, for chrissakes) and only supports hard drives up to 8GB (which probably seemed pretty damn forward-looking in those days). Which means it's new motherboard time. Whee!
Now, it should be noted that despite my Mad Komputah Skillz, I've only put in a motherboard once before and I made a complete botch job of it, getting it working eventually, but kinda leaving it hanging off in various directions. I tell Hugh about this, but he's adamant that he wants to put a computer together from scratch.
So we go out and buy a new motherboard. And a new chip (Athlon 1100) and a new sound card (the old sound card is ISA and there aren't many options for ISA compatible boards nowadays), and we take it home. And take everything out of Hugh's old box (the old sound card an AWE32 is massive, spreading it carefully around to make as much clutter as possible. Then, having assured Meredith that we wouldn't lose her email and address book, we hoover out the old box and start the install.
Which goes a lot better than expected. The only tricky bit turns out to be the cooling fan, which needs a lot of force to put on, despite the dire warnings in the shop that forcing it will crack the chip. So we phone a friend who's done this before, and then (lacking an audience to ask) decide to go for it and really lever that sucker into place. And lo and behold there's no horrible cracking sound, which must be good, right?
We hastily pile the rest of the cards in and plug it all in. Hugh had asked me earlier what the chances of it working first time were, and I said they were higher than the likelihood of the heat death of univers occuring that afternoon. But not much higher. And of course it doesn't. So we panic, pull out the graphics card and give it a solid shove to get it back in, and that makes that bit work. But then the hard drives don't work, so we throw away the brand spanking new hard drive cable and try and old one, which makes that work. And it starts booting windows 2000, which means we're all done, right?
Nope, it crashes halfway through the boot. So we try safe mode, and we try unplugging everything unecessary, and eventually we do a diagnostic check and discover it's crashing loading the drivers for the old motherboard, which is now in a pile in the corner. Which is fantastic. If it got into windows, it would discover that it didn't have that motherboard any more, and would drop those drivers, but as it can't get in, it can't. Catch 22 a la Microsoft.
So Hugh wanders off to borrow a friend's Win2K disk (naughty naughty) comes back and we do an install from scratch on the new HD.
Which, since it's a fast computer and a fast disk and a fast internet connection (cable) means that within 2 hours of that point we have a complete system with everything off of Windows Update, Zonealarm and AVG antivirus installed.
At which point we go dancing. Yay!
But this isn't good enough for Hugh. No, he needs a new hard disk as well. So he goes out and buys one, and it's damned cheap too (40Gig for less than £100 sounds ludicrous to my ancient mind, which still thinks in megabytes). He takes it home and plugs it in.
It doesn't work.
So he tries it in all it's combinations and permutations.
It doesn't work.
So he takes it back to the shop, and before changing it, they try it out.
It works.
Which means it must be his motherboard which doesn't like it. So I go over on Saturday and with SiSoft Sandra discover that his motherboard is an ancient Jetway Ali chipset (where ancient means it's from the last millenium, for chrissakes) and only supports hard drives up to 8GB (which probably seemed pretty damn forward-looking in those days). Which means it's new motherboard time. Whee!
Now, it should be noted that despite my Mad Komputah Skillz, I've only put in a motherboard once before and I made a complete botch job of it, getting it working eventually, but kinda leaving it hanging off in various directions. I tell Hugh about this, but he's adamant that he wants to put a computer together from scratch.
So we go out and buy a new motherboard. And a new chip (Athlon 1100) and a new sound card (the old sound card is ISA and there aren't many options for ISA compatible boards nowadays), and we take it home. And take everything out of Hugh's old box (the old sound card an AWE32 is massive, spreading it carefully around to make as much clutter as possible. Then, having assured Meredith that we wouldn't lose her email and address book, we hoover out the old box and start the install.
Which goes a lot better than expected. The only tricky bit turns out to be the cooling fan, which needs a lot of force to put on, despite the dire warnings in the shop that forcing it will crack the chip. So we phone a friend who's done this before, and then (lacking an audience to ask) decide to go for it and really lever that sucker into place. And lo and behold there's no horrible cracking sound, which must be good, right?
We hastily pile the rest of the cards in and plug it all in. Hugh had asked me earlier what the chances of it working first time were, and I said they were higher than the likelihood of the heat death of univers occuring that afternoon. But not much higher. And of course it doesn't. So we panic, pull out the graphics card and give it a solid shove to get it back in, and that makes that bit work. But then the hard drives don't work, so we throw away the brand spanking new hard drive cable and try and old one, which makes that work. And it starts booting windows 2000, which means we're all done, right?
Nope, it crashes halfway through the boot. So we try safe mode, and we try unplugging everything unecessary, and eventually we do a diagnostic check and discover it's crashing loading the drivers for the old motherboard, which is now in a pile in the corner. Which is fantastic. If it got into windows, it would discover that it didn't have that motherboard any more, and would drop those drivers, but as it can't get in, it can't. Catch 22 a la Microsoft.
So Hugh wanders off to borrow a friend's Win2K disk (naughty naughty) comes back and we do an install from scratch on the new HD.
Which, since it's a fast computer and a fast disk and a fast internet connection (cable) means that within 2 hours of that point we have a complete system with everything off of Windows Update, Zonealarm and AVG antivirus installed.
At which point we go dancing. Yay!
