June 17th, 2005

Computers serve the solitude-seekers admirably.

Two weeks ago, when I was in the throes of agony with two infected and totally plugged ears, I was also playing Pimp My Computer because my old desktop system had given up the ghost.

The old system was a trusty steed for the five years that I had it; a Pentium III - 600 (EB). Good chipset on the motherboard, and an ATI Rage 128 graphics card with a Vortex sound card. In fact, it still is a decent machine, but I wanted better and faster, dammit ... and it started with the operating system, which was its Achilles' heel: Windows 98.

Crashes, weird behaviour, less and less compatibility with newer software, and just that bloated state that MS operating systems get when they've been hanging around on your hard drive for a few years.

So the hard drive ceased functioning. I didn't realise it at the time, but it was physical damage ... I mean, you can shake it and hear something rattling around inside—like a burnt out lightbulb. I wasn't unhappy about losing the hard drive, I now had a reason to start improving my system. Thus began my more-expensive-than-I-had-wanted journey:

  1. First I bought and installed a 120 Gig hard drive to replace the dead 60 Gig hard drive—which was never more than 1/4 full. This is almost definitely more than I will ever need (of course, I said that in 1991 about my XT's 20 Meg hard drive, didn't I?)
  2. Then I started installing Windows 2000 ... except that Windows 2000 didn't like my ATI Rage 128 graphics card.
  3. Okay, fine. I can boot in Safe Mode and continue hardware detection from there.
  4. Except I got another arcane error message that I eventually learned was due to an obsolete BIOS.
  5. No worries, I thought to myself, I'll download a newer BIOS and flash-install it onto the motherboard.
  6. Except Windows 2000 still didn't like my BIOS.
  7. Fine. It was time for a new motherboard and CPU anyway. I got an Athlon copy called a Sempron. This one is a 2800+ (though a couple of benchmark programs both showed it in the 2.3 to 2.5 GHz Celeron range ... so 2800+ is a bit of an exaggeration). It's close to low-end, but it's plenty fast enough for my needs. And 1/2 Gig of RAM should keep even Windows happy.
  8. Assembled the motherboard (had to buy a $10.00 little miniature tube of heat-synch goop—they really know when they've got you by the short and curlies, don't they?)
  9. Discovered that my ATI Rage 128 card won't physically fit into the AGP 8X slot! It is an AGP graphics card, but they kept changing the form factor for a while.
  10. New graphics card: ATI Radeon 9600 Pro. Pretty nice little card, actually; probably overkill for what I need, but at least nobody will ever accuse me of being cheap when it comes to graphics cards.
  11. Assembled machine inside old case using old power supply, carefully wiping out all the dust bunnies that accumulate in five years.
  12. Managed to figure out all those little wires for the lights on the front of the case correctly.
  13. Turned on and marvelled that all worked perfectly the first time, including the setup program for Windows 2000, which installed flawlessly and entirely without my intervention!

So I am definitely pleased with the results, and happy that I still remember how to put these blasted things together after a 5-year absence from doing that sort of thing. Actually, it used to be more difficult, what with jumper settings for voltages, and pieces that didn't quite conform to the form factors of old boxes. Wires that were all the same colour and hard to trace from the front panel to the motherboard harness ... and power connectors that didn't have the same size or shape. Things are not so bad as they were a few years ago.

I was also happy with myself for doing all this work while being virtually unable to hear anything and suffering a fairly steady throbbing pain because of my double ear infection.

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