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This journal's been jumping about in time even more than Pulp Fiction recently, but there's only one more entry from the past that needs to go up before everything is realigned again. I'm putting them up over a few days so you can ignore them individually rather than having a sixty-screen block of text to scroll through every time you visit your Friends page.
Whitney and I have already performed a spectacular achievement in that we assembled a computer from scratch without breaking any of it. Whitney's dad Malcolm had ordered a cheap computer online, and expected it to come as a complete article rather than have them dump all the bits in his office. The two of us have been in the basement piecing it together, something that I haven't done since working on Nils' machine in the lab last year. The computer is going to be used as my machine until I leave for Boston, and now has my hard drives and graphics card added to it.
Even though I regularly pull my computer apart and reassemble it, this was the first time that I'd touched a motherboard, processor and fan. Putting in a motherboard is easy enough, but it was made slightly fiddly by the way that the back didn't slide out of the case. There were also only five screws and spacers when we were expecting seven, so it still wobbles a bit.
The most difficult part of the whole procedure was putting in the processor and fan, just because I'm terrified I'm going to break everything by even touching them. The instructions said to look for two white dots to match up, and on looking at the chip, we found we had a triangle, a large dot and two smaller ones (all beige). I eventually got the alignment right by counting the pins on each side. The fan is stuck to the processor with a bit of thermal paste, and four gigantic plastic screws that were impossible to turn without bending the motherboard quite worryingly. But it's in.
Once that had been done, everything else was familiar to me. I don't like putting in memory because you need about three pairs of hands to push it in evenly and flip both the switches at the same time, but it's possible. AGP and PCI cards are dead easy, though it seemed the screws that came with the case were the wrong size for the slots on the back. They'll be fine as long as I don't drop it.
It was here that I discovered the CD-ROM drive I'd been provided with was from Malaysia and had a huge 50-pin connector, which I'd never seen anything like. A rummage in the avalanche of components and bags in the home office next door revealed three further drives, one of which eventually worked. After putting in my hard drives, everything was ready, and miraculously, when I turned it on I got the single beep from the BIOS that signalled that everything was working correctly.
The next step was to activate Windows. I know that the activation key is meant to prevent piracy, and I appreciate the steps against it (despite having about 3GB in my Retro and Rom folders now) - however, it's my copy of Windows, and making me have to apply for a new activation key when I change my hardware too much seems pretty criminal. Well, this copy is still installed on my parents' computer as well, but that's not the point. Last time I activated Windows on their machine, it said that it wouldn't let me use the key again the first time, but inexplicably worked once I tried again the next day. I thought that that would happen again, but I didn't have any such luck, so I decided to download a key generator.
Half an hour later, once AVG had finished cleaning the plethora of viruses off my hard drive, I decided that I really was mug enough to phone up Microsoft and ask them to activate it for me. The process involves being prompted to shout a fifty-four-digit number at the automated operator when you could easily just type it in in ten seconds, and when that eventually fails to recognise it, you're put through to an operator. After repeating the number to her and telling her a minor fib about the number of computers I'm using the OS on, I was given a confirmation number and that was the end of it. The worst thing that can happen is that my dad's copy is deactivated when it next connects to the Internet, but I think in that case he can go and buy it for himself.
I have a couple of problems that someone might know about, though. Here's a random sentence in bold so that people don't give up before reading this bit. The first is that Windows seems to have forgotten a couple of my file associations. The problem seems to be limited to video and music files - the icons remain intact, but every time I try to open one it asks me what I want to use to open the file. Even when I select Media Classic and tick the "Always use this program" box, it comes back every time I open anything else.
The second isn't really a problem, but I just want to check - is 50 degrees a normal temperature for a Celeron processor to run at, or is it likely to explode and kill me before I finish typing this entry? Actually,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dunqn - who I've just noticed no longer exists - has just answered this one, and he says it's fine.
Thirdly, the My Documents folder has gone. It hasn't been removed, it's still in C:/Documents and Settings/Newton/My Documents/ (I apologize, but this keyboard does not have a backslash key) but the link from My Computer has gone, and it's helpfully refusing to let me drag a shortcut into it or anything simple like that.
Well, I'm not dead yet.
Whitney and I have already performed a spectacular achievement in that we assembled a computer from scratch without breaking any of it. Whitney's dad Malcolm had ordered a cheap computer online, and expected it to come as a complete article rather than have them dump all the bits in his office. The two of us have been in the basement piecing it together, something that I haven't done since working on Nils' machine in the lab last year. The computer is going to be used as my machine until I leave for Boston, and now has my hard drives and graphics card added to it.
Even though I regularly pull my computer apart and reassemble it, this was the first time that I'd touched a motherboard, processor and fan. Putting in a motherboard is easy enough, but it was made slightly fiddly by the way that the back didn't slide out of the case. There were also only five screws and spacers when we were expecting seven, so it still wobbles a bit.
The most difficult part of the whole procedure was putting in the processor and fan, just because I'm terrified I'm going to break everything by even touching them. The instructions said to look for two white dots to match up, and on looking at the chip, we found we had a triangle, a large dot and two smaller ones (all beige). I eventually got the alignment right by counting the pins on each side. The fan is stuck to the processor with a bit of thermal paste, and four gigantic plastic screws that were impossible to turn without bending the motherboard quite worryingly. But it's in.
Once that had been done, everything else was familiar to me. I don't like putting in memory because you need about three pairs of hands to push it in evenly and flip both the switches at the same time, but it's possible. AGP and PCI cards are dead easy, though it seemed the screws that came with the case were the wrong size for the slots on the back. They'll be fine as long as I don't drop it.
It was here that I discovered the CD-ROM drive I'd been provided with was from Malaysia and had a huge 50-pin connector, which I'd never seen anything like. A rummage in the avalanche of components and bags in the home office next door revealed three further drives, one of which eventually worked. After putting in my hard drives, everything was ready, and miraculously, when I turned it on I got the single beep from the BIOS that signalled that everything was working correctly.
The next step was to activate Windows. I know that the activation key is meant to prevent piracy, and I appreciate the steps against it (despite having about 3GB in my Retro and Rom folders now) - however, it's my copy of Windows, and making me have to apply for a new activation key when I change my hardware too much seems pretty criminal. Well, this copy is still installed on my parents' computer as well, but that's not the point. Last time I activated Windows on their machine, it said that it wouldn't let me use the key again the first time, but inexplicably worked once I tried again the next day. I thought that that would happen again, but I didn't have any such luck, so I decided to download a key generator.
Half an hour later, once AVG had finished cleaning the plethora of viruses off my hard drive, I decided that I really was mug enough to phone up Microsoft and ask them to activate it for me. The process involves being prompted to shout a fifty-four-digit number at the automated operator when you could easily just type it in in ten seconds, and when that eventually fails to recognise it, you're put through to an operator. After repeating the number to her and telling her a minor fib about the number of computers I'm using the OS on, I was given a confirmation number and that was the end of it. The worst thing that can happen is that my dad's copy is deactivated when it next connects to the Internet, but I think in that case he can go and buy it for himself.
I have a couple of problems that someone might know about, though. Here's a random sentence in bold so that people don't give up before reading this bit. The first is that Windows seems to have forgotten a couple of my file associations. The problem seems to be limited to video and music files - the icons remain intact, but every time I try to open one it asks me what I want to use to open the file. Even when I select Media Classic and tick the "Always use this program" box, it comes back every time I open anything else.
The second isn't really a problem, but I just want to check - is 50 degrees a normal temperature for a Celeron processor to run at, or is it likely to explode and kill me before I finish typing this entry? Actually,
dunqn - who I've just noticed no longer exists - has just answered this one, and he says it's fine.Thirdly, the My Documents folder has gone. It hasn't been removed, it's still in C:/Documents and Settings/Newton/My Documents/ (I apologize, but this keyboard does not have a backslash key) but the link from My Computer has gone, and it's helpfully refusing to let me drag a shortcut into it or anything simple like that.
Well, I'm not dead yet.
