Three weeks go by, with no other excuse than sheer laziness. But that's okay, there's lots to catch up on. Starting with this past weekend, when I overhauled the computer from which I type most of these entries. At work we've been going back and forth with the powers that be for the last year about getting new equipment, as the stuff we acquired when we first started in January of 2001 has long since become obsolete. But no, the traders get new equipment as a result of the move last November, and their old equipment, from their previous move, which was about two years ago, is still under warranty and therefore must be used by somebody, so it fell to us to inherit it, even though only some of it is better than what we already have, and that only marginally better. So I have a new (to me) pc under my desk that isn't plugged in or connected to anything, while I continue to pound away on a three-years-and-counting Compaq laptop with a P3 833 processor.



So I thought if I can't have decent equipment at work, at least I can do an upgrade at home. As it works out, my home PC was also celebrating its three-year anniversary and was officially obsolete, so I took a few hundred dollars of bonus money and bought me a 2.8Ghz P4 and a new mobo to go with it, along with an upgrade to Windows XP. Saturday night I finally got a chance to take it all apart and install everything, and was annoyed to discover that my 768MB of memory was now useless, as the older SDRAM memory (of which I could only use 512 MB under Windows Me) has been supplanted in newer mother boards by DDR memory.



As luck would have it, the computer show that comes to town periodically was here this weekend, so Sunday morning (an hour short on sleep after making the shift to Daylight Savings Time) I went down to the Royal Plaza Trade Center and got myself half a gig of PC3200 DDR ram for about $100. Before lunch I was home, popped in the memory, plugged everything in and fired it up and got exactly nothing. The fans were spinning, but no video, no boot, not even system beeps, which was kind of spooky. After poking around for a couple of hours (with the kids hovering around saying "Is it still broken?" and "Have you fixed it yet?" every two minutes, much like management when something goes wrong at work) and checking Intel's website, I hit upon the tidbit that not only had my memory module been obsolete, but so was the power supply of all things. All these extra USB ports mean the motherboard needs more power, Cap'n, with an extra plug that if not used prevents the system from booting.



Feeling somewhat skeptical that this was in fact the problem, but not having any better ideas, I went back to the computer show and bought a 350W power supply from the same vendor for $18, which seemed suspiciously cheap, but I figured for 18 bucks I'd give it a shot. Came back home again, swapped out the power supply in about 10 minutes, plugged everything back in, and the thing booted up like a trooper, even reading the hard drive and installing a bunch of new drivers. I'd sort of figured I'd have to reformat the drive in order to use the new motherboard, and this ended up being the case, since even though I could boot ok it did act a little weird (hang up when trying to delete a file, dir /od wouldn't list the files in date order, etc.).



So I booted the Win XP disk, told it to format C (which is always good for a thrill), and let the XP install do it's thing. Once I got the network drivers off the cd that came with the board, it found my router and got me connected to the internet without any further intervention on my part. Getting used to the XP interface takes a little getting used to (I know XP's been out forever, but it's only recently that it's gotten relatively cheap, and it's such a pain in the ass to upgrade). Word took a couple of tries before it would install correctly. Liked to never got the printer drivers enabled, but finally did. Still have a pile of stuff to re-download and/or reinstall, but nothing I can't live without for a little while.



Once again I'm amazed at how difficult it is to do all this, which is why I suspect most non-computer-geeky types would rather just buy a new (pre-built) system than either install new hardware or upgrade the OS. I kept the hard drive and disk drives, video and sound cards, which are all still perfectly adequate (and not rendered obsolete by upgrading the other stuff), so for around $400 I could give myself essentially a brand new machine with a processor boost from 1200 to 2800 Mhz. I'd like to get another half gig of memory just because with XP I could actually make use of it, and eventually one of them new-fangled flat panel monitors, but otherwise I can sit tight for awhile with this configuration.



But not for too long, since next year the downstairs PC will hit that portentous third birthday, too.