Posts tagged Computers
Struggling with the New Computer
May 8th
In my last post, I described the first issue I had with my new computer, which turned out not to be an issue at all. I had planned to follow that up the next day with a description of how bad of a time I had trying to install and update XP. But a more critical issue cropped up that kept me largely offline for a few days. Now, my shiny new system is sitting off to the side of my desk and I’m back on my old one. I’ll be venting about it over the next couple of days.
In the meantime, in relation to my DRM Hell post, here’s some more DRM nonsense to gawk at. This time it comes from the gaming world and involves Bioware, a company who has made several games I enjoy. Looks like EA, the mega publisher who bought them out, is planning to ruin several future titles with the same system, most notably Spore. I was really eager to buy Spore on its release, but if its burdened with this sort of draconian activation scheme that is required every 10 days — no thanks. Hat tip to Scorpia and Shamus.
The New Computer Part One: Aldacron Meets SATA
May 2nd
Ugh! The past 15 hours have been trying. I was planning to build a new computer in a couple of weeks, but decided on a whim to go ahead and put one together yesterday evening. I headed out to the local electronics market, picked out my hardware, paid someone to put it together for me (I rather don’t enjoy doing it myself), and brought my new baby home.
The first headache came with the second boot. The first boot was just for me to go into the BIOS to make sure everything looked cool. All of the devices were detected, so I tweaked a few settings and exited. The hard drive is a SATA, something I’ve never had any experience with. My old system was put together nearly 5 years ago and, as most other boxes I’ve owned, had IDE drives. I placed my Windows XP disk in my shiny Samsung DVD multi and rebooted. At the end of the POST, I was staring at a message that no master IDE drive was found and I needed to press F1 to continue. Uh-oh.
Pressing F1 resulted in black screen with a flashing underscore in the top corner. So, I rebooted and jumped back into the BIOS configuration. Just as before, the hard drive was there in the list of SATA drives. Reboot. No master IDE drive detected, press F1 to continue. Much confusion and head scratching ensued.
For the next 45 minutes or so, I fooled around trying to find the problem. First, I looked inside the case to make sure the HDD was connected properly. It was. I dug into the manual. No help there. I booted up a few more times with the same result. Finally, after pressing F1 for the umpteenth time and seeing the same black screen with the flashing underscore, I hung my head in defeat. Tomorrow, I would grab my box and take it back to the place where I bought it for help. As I sat there in misery, my hopes of using my new system dashed, the screen changed. The Windows installation was beginning.
I was elated, but at the same time felt like an idiot. I wasted nearly an hour for no reason at all. If I’d waited a second or two longer each time I’d rebooted… But, it was done. And now everything was working. Or so I thought.
