(there was an accidental misnumbering here)
Or, the trials and tribulations of making Ye Olde Ancient P133 work again.
Our tale begins about 6 months ago or so. With my good comp at college, I wanted something to play around on when I was at home. And my old computer was still running, so I decided hey, let's use that. And Life Was Good. Then came the idea "Hey, let's put Win98 on it!" Oops. The problems involved in this were legion, of course. The monitor was a replacement for one that sort of...died a couple years ago, and the CD-ROM is a new one. Then there's the new hard drive I slaved in. Actually getting all of this required finding 6 or 7 sets of drivers, dinking around with the damn mouse driver of all things for half an hour, and then screwing around with a variety of video card and monitor drivers because I was stuck in 640x480 at 16 colors for no apparent reason. Finally got it working again, popped it into 1024x768 at high color, which is the normal resolution of the civilized world, and then sat back in relief at having made it work. Oh wait, the Zip drive. Crap.
*plugscrewscrewtightentightenplugarghthisisthe800threbootdiediedie* And then I was done, and Life Was Good Once More.
Then the hard drive blew. Again. Which is a story in and of itself. You see, the hard drive that blew was the third refurbished replacement of the original drive that I bought to slave to the original one that came with the computer. Western Digital, it is to be noticed, sucks. At one point in '97 I decided hey, 1.2gig HDs are small now. They used to be big, but they are now small. So I got myself a brand spanking new 3.2 gig Western Digital. And life was good, and I threw multitudes of everything remotely important and big except the OS on it. And then it died. So I got it replaced, because warranty rocks. Repeat process. Apparently after the second death they felt sorry enough for me that they replaced it with a refurbished 4 gig. Unfortunately my BIOS is so amazingly crappy that it doesn't recognize anything between 3.2 gigs and around 10 gigs. So I was stuck with a refurb 3.2. And then THAT died. Thus making me overly happy. Went and got the BIOS to not recognize it, and proceeded to load up the 1.2 again. Which meant putting AoK, Netscape, WinZip, ICQ, and Zmud on it. The HD is now almost full. Argh.
And the story continues with my loaning it out to a friend over the summer. I mean, I didn't need the damn thing at home. Of course when college started, I wanted it back, so back it came. Mostly covered in some brown glop that I don't want to think about. They keyboard was so filthy I had to take off the coverplate, which is still off. To make things even better, The power cords didn't make it back, so I had to pack mine home with me. YAY! But it gets better. Forgot to plug in the Zip, so no Zip. Oh well, I can live with that. Well, how about music? *pops in CD* What? It doesn't recognize the CD-ROM? Ack. Pop up control panel, dig around in the hardware. Sure enough, no CD-ROM. Well, I'll just have it detect it and do that. Run the really long find hardware thing. Nope. Doh. Well, crap, I guess I'll dig around in the BIOS. Nope. And then upon returning to Windows, it worked again. Lame.
Finally, my old mouse does not have a wheel. As the entire civilized world realizes by this point, the wheel in the center of the mouse is God's Gift to the Human Race. You can scroll up and down pages without moving your mouse all over hell and gone. But no. Oh well.
Fortunately, I get my new comp back tomorrow when I go home. I can hardly wait.
Posted by Dwip at November 19, 2000 10:38 PM