DeeKnow’s Grotto

Last week I received the final pieces of hardware I’d ordered to rebuild my home machine and give its performance a kick in the arse to drag it screaming into the 21st century. Being the luddite that I am I’ve always been on the trailing edge as far as home computing power is concerned, priding myself on my ability to “get by on less”.

This time however I thought I’d splash out an get some half-decent shit, spoil myself you might say.

So it was that on Saturday morning I powered off my home PC and began to dismantle it, keeping calm by sipping on a nice glass of Austrian weissbier.

Things went well, the old kit came out, and the new stuff began to go back in without too much fuss. Apart from that is, the shock of some new interfaces and devices:

o SATA drive and its signal/power cables (I thought IDE was modern)
o Micro-ATX m/b (how can they squeeze so much on so little)
o 3GB Core2 Duo CPU (is that a fan or an air-conditioning unit)
o 512MB PCIex16 Video card (what the hell is a GPU, some sort of typo?)
o 2GB 800MHz Ram (I used to think a 100MHz FSB was cool)

The new stuff meant for the first time in a long time I actually read-the-fucking-manual, just in case I screwed things up and pissed off the domestic accountant by retreating from the office with a handfull of smoking silicon and plastic.

As I mentioned, things were goin swimmingly, plugged in the peripherals, powered the box up, BIOS config appeared, looking good so far, a couple of tweaks, pop in the WindowsXP install CD and restart. Installer pops up, copies files to disk, and asks for the verification number.

I was rather apprehensive at this point as the install CD was from “a reliable source”.. and that source had written the key on the CD for me from memory. This had me worried at the time, I mean who remembers a sequence of 5 random 4-char hex characters reliably from memory.

Anyway, as luck wouldnt have it, the key was wrong and I was left swearing and cursing with a newly formatted drive and a thousand dollars of hardware I couldnt put to any use. I couldn’t even install Linux coz I’d misplaced my Ubuntu CD, and theres no way Id be putting all that old stuff back in the box. So that it was it then.

Given that this was a long weekend, and that I’d started on Saturday morning, I was facing a weekend without my beloved machine, and the corresponding lack of access to flight-simulator, and the Internet.

Oh well. Where is that Book?