A New PC for Me - Eventually

29th September 2006

After hearing the Intel representative speak at the OCCA meeting in August, I finally shelled out the money and got an Intel Core 2 Duo PC, with a 250 gig Sata2 hard drive, and a Gig of RAM. Last Friday night I picked up the parts, (assembled and posting) and set out to Install Windows.

To make a long story short, by Sunday I had installed Windows 7 times, and each time, something went wrong within an hour or two, during my “regular” software installations.

I made multiple trips to the shop, and was given a hard drive replacement the first time, new RAM on another trip, and even a change of motherboards on the third (”Okay, Scott, we’re sure we’ve got it this time…”).

Finally, on my fourth trip in two days, the problem was traced to a teeny tiny pinhole in the IDE (CD Rom) cable! Matt at the Clackamas PC Club held it up to the light, and we could see right through it, with likely two broken wires (out of 80)

The worst part was that I had already tried a new IDE cable, but apparently my own replacement was bad too, because then I showed no CD Rom drive installed at all.

To the bitter end of my weekend, that IDE cable with just 78 of 80 pins would install Windows just fine, then even install some of my software too, before the computer stopped working.

Each time, a format and reinstall got me back to the desktop, only to repeat the misery with various corruptions in Windows, no matter what I tried. It reminded me how much I DON’T miss being a computer tech!

Anyway, that’s how I spent last weekend, and this weekend I’m going to finish up my software installations, and do a data transfer. No more crummy P4 with a gig and a half of RAM for me!

This thing screams, and my days of looking at the hourglass are over. It’s probably the “last computer I’ll ever need”, right?

Thanks Matt, for saving my sanity…