I've got an idea for Tim Burton... yes, the Tim Burton that makes movies. The working title is, "The I.T. Nightmare Before Christmas". The protagonist would be named Jack SCSIngton, of course.
It all started on Christmas Eve, of course. We received three packages from Amazon that day. One contained a 2.5" HDD which would be used as a Playstation 3 upgrade, and a couple 2GB sticks of memory for our son's computer. The second shipment was a brand new refurb XP box for my wife. The third was a cheese wedge-shaped box containing an industrial quantity of mouse toys for our cats. These arrivals brought joy to everyone's hearts.
Our son brought his PC up to the dining room table, which seems to be the designated hardware upgrade area. I spread out some newspapers to keep the case from getting scratched, and laid the PC down. I opened it up, and our son said the memory slots were directly underneath the spaghetti mess of I/O, power, and who-knows-what-else cabling. Since the case has more than its share of plastic, I had to do a bit of looking before I found a substantial piece of metal to ground myself before opening the memory. Feeling pretty positive about my personal electrical field, I opened up the package, gently pried a stick out, and examined the pins and notch at the base of the stick. After a few attempts, I was able to partially seat one end of the memory. The other end, though... well, it was having no part of being seated. When gentle pressure was applied, it rocked. So, I applied a bit of logic and turned it around.
And got the same result. Our son right now was getting a bit upset. "I think you've got the wrong memory" I said, but he quite vehemently disagreed with me. "Nope," he said. When logic, restraint, nicety and reason all fail, there is only one thing left. The cold, hard truth. I put the new stick back in its cocoon, and reached back into the belly of the beast. This time, I had to fight with the previously mentioned spaghetti mess, gently but firmly moving cabling aside to get to Bank 0 of the memory. I disengaged the latches and pulled out the original memory, then grabbed the new memory. Placing them back to back, I showed our son that the notches did not line up, even when I turned one of the sticks around. Nonplussed, our son quickly blamed his brother for ordering the wrong memory, and we took the PC back down to our Secret Underground Lair.
Our other son got an RMA, and the memory should be going back tomorrow.
As for my wife's new PC, it was pretty much a dead out of box PC (geek level here is prolly +7). Now, I've gotta say, I've been working both professionally and at home for a long time with Windows XP. I've done untold numbers of "nuke the hard drive back to the stone age" reinstalls. I own XP recovery disks for SP3; I have the SP2 direct-from-Redmond disk somewhere, and our house has pretty much been an HP "shop" since I discovered the joy of refurbs many years ago.I had a DC7100, and then several DC7600 HP "convertible minitowers". Over the years, I've become adept at maintaining and upgrading them. The PC I got for my wife was a DC7800- part of the family, I suppose, but more related to my XW4200 workstation in appearance, at least.
Appearances, however, can be deceiving. Even for XP, a 10+ minute boot time is extreme. When this PC is booted, I get a cursor in the upper left side of the display that blinks for ~5 minutes. Then, Windows starts to load. I'd say that's a problem. My wife is taking it very well, because it is just a tech upgrade to her. For me, it was something related to Christmas, and a huge disappointment.
Lastly, there's the database. I don't update very often, partly because I'm also doing my own data entry. I did discover one thing interesting about it, though. In more than one table, I have a user defined field named "ID". It wasn't a huge issue until tonight, when I discovered that two of my tables had identically formatted ID fields.I have since remedied this.
Well, almost lastly. The mice seem to work just fine.
No comments:
Post a Comment