Upgrades from Hell : Mique 2! Upgrades from Hell : Mique 2!Mique asked me to look at his son's computer that he's taking to Asia(*).
A P2-350 with a god-awful Intel 8MB I740 graphics card and 128MB, with a 10GB main drive and a 5GB secondary with a 'bad spot' on it.
To upgrade the CPU would mean a motherboard upgrade as well (CPU $250, motherboard $300+), without any real performance boost, so I suggested spending money on a decent video card and some more memory.
Ended up getting a GeForce2 MX 32MB video card, a 20GB Hdisk, an IDE removable frame, and a 128MB stick of memory for just over $600. Mique also got himself an additional 128MB of memory for his machine.
GeForce2 MX has 90% performance of GeForce2 GTS, for 50% of the cost ($198), high performance GeForce 2 GTS ULTRA DDR video cards with 64MB memory are $1100 or so, which is a ridiculous price to pay for a video card.
Into Mique's Yurt, and take the existing machine apart. Remove video card, put in new video card, go to add memory -- oh oh -- the 3 SDRAM slots are already filled! 1 * 64MB and 2 * 32MB dimms. Dammit! Took one of the 32MB dimms out, put the 128MB dimm in, but am not happy with three different types of memory in the machine.
Boot up to test, and 224Mbytes shows up, the video card is recognised, install the Windows ME drivers for the video card, and all is sweet.
Explain my misgivings about the odd memory arrangement, and get Mique's 128MB and put it in the machine, removing the 64MB and 32MB dimms. Now it has 256MB, dutifully tested, and things are fine.
Next the hard drive. The idea was to have a IDE removable frame arrangement so that backups could be kept on hard disks. With 20GB of hard disk costing $200, it's as good a backup mechanism as anything -- pop the drive in, format it, back up data, take it out, a month later, back up more data, take it out. When full, buy a new IDE HD, pop it in the frame, format, backup. Piece of cake! We decided that having a 10GB main and a 20GB backup was dumb, so the idea was put the 10GB in the IDE Frame, and have the 20GB as the main drive.
Remove hard drives from case. Put in 20GB drive. Put in IDE frame into 5.25" slot up top (the screws went into unthreaded plastic 'holes', and were a complete bitch to put in). Take the inner removable bit out, and put the 10GB hard disk in there. The IDE cable wouldn't fit well, and kept popping off the back of the HD, a bit of force made it stick, and all seemed well.
Put case back on desk, power up, find 20GB HD, but BIOS cannot locate 10GB HD anywhere. Weird.
Take frame out, have a look, check connections, try again, no go.
Take hard drive out of frame, connect up to IDE cable and power, and try detecting -- first time, no problem! So the problem lay in the IDE frame somewhere.
Had a good look, nothing noticable, tried again, with no success. Tried a different hard drive, with no success. Dead frame.
Meanwhile his son and daughter have taken separate cars on separate visits, and we can't go back to the shop to get a replacement frame due to 1) lack of transport and 2) they only had one in the shop!
So I called Val and asked her to nip down to the local computer shop in Philip, and get an IDE frame, then come over to Mique's place and have a nice cup of tea :)
Whilst she rushed off to do that, I set about installing Windows 2000 on the new 20GB drive.
Boot off the Win2000Pro CD, it reads it, starts working through the excessive list of drivers it preloads, and then hangs. Hmm.
Try again, and it hangs even quicker this time. HMMM.
Ok, boot up from Windows ME boot floppy, and format the hard disk manually (t e d i o u s) now it's formatted, try copying the Windows 2000 CD onto the Hard Disk, but no functional XCOPY program around, DAMMIT.
Boot from CD, and it fails to recognise the CD as being bootable. Fuck fuck fuck. Try again, same thing.
Turn machine off, try to boot from CD, and it works, loads up all the drivers, gets past the places where it hung, and Windows 2000 finally installs.
Val calls 'No luck, they said try OPC or Harvey Normans in Woden'. Grr. She goes off to try.
Back to machine, load GeForce drivers. Install printer (magic, Windows2000Pro -knows- about the HP Printer!, go to install scanner, and the software is Windows 98 ONLY, so won't install. Try to get upgrade from internet, but it required the Win2000 Scanjet CD which we don't have. Bummer.
Val calls again "no go at OPC or Harvey Norman, but they reckon that way over in Fyshwick they are sure to have one". I say 'forget it, sorry for the hassle', and curse myself for not having rung around first instead of sending Val off on a wild goose chase :(
We decide to put the 10GB drive in the machine as drive D and just use it as a backup drive -- Mique's son can sort out what he wants to do when it finally gets full. Knowing computer users, the drive will just be used for 'games' and stuff, and backups won't be possible, and all the planning will go flopbot :)
Anyway, SIX hours later, I get home, having missed my one and only chance to play the #1 Hearts player on the Microsoft Gaming Zone (I was #2 at the time). But thats not important.
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