Sunday, December 19, 2004

The Computer That Would Not Live.

About three weeks ago while driving to a store I thought of an idea. An idea to make my sister a computer out of the many parts laying around the house. These parts, good parts, had come from other computers and needed a home, a home that was not my home, or more importantly, not Debs home.

So the plan was hatched. I had a nice Dell case, 400 MHz Pentium 2, 196 megs of RAM, 8 Gig Hard disk, 4x burner, and all of the little things that would make a decent internet surfer, non-gamer, utility rig. Just what my sister needed. I lovingly gathered all of the parts and began building what I thought would be a 2-3 hour job. I was wrong.

Open it up, clean it out, hook up the drives, connect the cables, clear the CMOS, close her up, plug her in, and push the power button. Floppy drive does a head seek... and does not stop! It sounds like a jackhammer and I can acutally feel the vibrations through the case. I kill the power and reverse the IDE cable. In other words... My fault. Second power up, RAM check freezes in mid stride. Kill the power and reseat the RAM. Third power up, no devices detected, none. Tear it apart, reseat everything, re-run the cables, try again... You starting to get the idea? This continues for a long time with many strange events with no rhyme or reason.

I am now on my 3rd hour and I just got the thing to boot up and have started to install the operating system on it... and the CD-ROM dies! That is okay because a have another one. DEAD! Three hours gone, have to go and buy a new CD-ROM drive tomorrow, and this thing is supposed her friggen Christmas present. So much for the easy computer build. Fruit cake is starting to sound a whole lot easier!

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