Integrating the Derivative

I have to admit that this post would probably be a lot more interesting if it actually was about destroying a computer with a sledgehammer!

A few days ago I decided to switch back to my old 600 MHz Pentium III computer. The computer I’d been using, a 900 MHz AMD Athlon, was just too unstable. Random crashes, lockups, and on top of that the processor fan was noisy as hell. So I made the decision to reinstall Windows XP and switch back to the older computer.

Now, I’m pretty used to doing this stuff. I’ve probably installed various flavors of Windows a few dozen times and I’ve done a lot of hardware installations. So I can handle this right?

My first expletives came out when I found out that the power supply from the AMD case wouldn’t fit into the Pentium case (AMD case and Pentium case being high-level technical terms of course). That meant that instead of just moving the hard drives and power supply I had to root EVERYTHING, motherboards and all, out of both cases and swap them. Damn it.

My next goal was to fit the front USB panel from the Pentium case into the AMD case. My Pentium III computer had originally come in a proprietary Compaq case which the front USB panel fit perfectly. Ever since I moved it into the Pentium case it’s been hanging out the front. In one of the few instances of things going right, I drilled a hole into the USB ports’ little case, put a bolt in it, and attached it to one side of the 5.25″ drive bays inside the case. It looks kind of funny but hey, it works. And that’s what counts right?

The next annoyance occurred when I went to plug in all the wires for the front panel switches and LEDs. Did I think to note the pinout before I took the motherboard out of the Pentium case? Of course not! Did I have a manual for the proprietary PoS Compaq motherboard? Of course not! So I got to spend a little while plugging jumpers into the 20 (?) pin header for the front panel trying to find out which pins were which. Eventually I was able to find the pins for the power switch and hard drive activity LED. I’ve tried to find the pins for the speaker but haven’t had any luck and I’m pretty sure I’ve tried every possible configuration. I’m pretty satisfied with the setup now so I’ll probably just leave it how it is now.

After all that, I was finally ready to install Windows. Since this is an older computer and I wasn’t sure I could boot from the CD, I brought out my Windows startup disk with plans to wipe the partitions from the hard drive with fdisk, format the disk, and install Windows XP. Alas, it was not to be. Fdisk returned a “divide by zero” error. What the hell? That’s never happened before. I assumed it was a problem with the fdisk file. I mean, I couldn’t possibly have put the hardware back in wrong….right? After that I spent about four hours downloading (we have very slow dialup internet) various versions of startup disks from my grandma’s computer. None of them worked of course. Finally I had the idea to swap the primary (from the hard drive) and secondary (from the CD-ROM) IDE cables and things finally worked right. I didn’t even have to use fdisk since the computer booted straight from the CD. Argh.

It was smooth sailing from there. Well, as long as you don’t count the 64 Windows update files I installed (I downloaded them a long time ago so I wouldn’t have to download them every time), the dozen or so programs I installed, the evening spent downloading the Windows updates I didn’t have, and the 20 MB update file for my antivirus program (which downloaded at a steady 1.6 kbps). It was finished!

Umm…yay?

Proof that what goes on the internet, stays on the internet. I got this in my email today:

[Name removed] has replied to your message on the Felton Family Genealogy Forum

When did I post that message? December 7, 2000.