(This post is actually from 2:01 p.m. on March 18, but I just realized that I had it saved as a draft and it hadn't been posted to the blog yet.)
My hope was to be able to turn on the machine and have Windows and everything load without a hitch. I'm sure some people reading this are snorting in disbelief or rolling with laughter. Apparently, so much change meant Windows XP was going to lay down the law.
The neat thing is that everything powered up on the first go. Thanks to a good, detailed mobo manual, I got all the cables for the power, HDD, etc. on the front of the case right. Like I explained to J, that's as fantastic as when we did the SR20DET swap in my old 240SX coupe and wired it up and had her fire up and go the first time. The BIOS loaded everything looked all sexy and then wham blue dump screen error message.
I'll save the long drawn out details for those who want them, but the summary is that it took me about 3 days to figure out how to get my OS problems sorted out. For the life of me I couldn't get my old master drive to go slave (or primary drive to go secondary for the P.C. amongst us). I couldn't remember my admin password anyway, so there was no repairing the original install. I got XP onto the new SATA drive (at around 1 a.m. on the second night), but then the machine wouldn't boot with both the PATA and SATA drives in. Eventually I realized that the IDE cable also determines whether a drive is primary or secondary. I wanted to kick myself at that point. It's a good thing I didn't give in and wipe the other drive too because I'd forgotten to back up my Firefox favorites!
The only other hiccup was getting the Internet to work. I was so frustrated that I hauled the machine in to work for my techie friends to peak at early one morning. Turns out Ms. Smarty Pants me hadn't installed the chipset drivers so the board, and wouldn't you know, it's the chipset drivers that handle the LAN port, onboard audio/video and other things lol
After that came program installs. I must say normally they are tedious and BORING but with a quad-core processor and 4GB of RAM, things literally FLEW across the screen. I had to slow and down stop clicking "Next" so fast for fear that I was installing a toolbar that I didn't need. Of course, The Sims is my benchmark, and what usually took a whole night to install (the base game, 5 expansions and 3 stuff packs) took less than an hour! I was able to install everything except Seasons before I went to work one morning and that was only because I couldn't find the Seasons disc one quicky!
Now I've loaded The Sims, which involved running the game a few times, but I haven't actually played it yet... that update coming soon!
No comments:
Post a Comment