Mmmm... brains.

[camwyn]

I went down to J&R Music and Computer and Appliance and Personal Care* World yesterday. After a few false starts- I thought the stores were connected, and they're not- I made my way through the door of #15 Park Row, where they keep the computer stuff. It took me a while to find my way to the mezzanine, where processor sales are arranged. See, at this store they keep most of the inventory in the basement. You tell the salesdude what you're buying and they fill out a form and have you sign it. Then you take your copy down to the cashier and pay, and they put your form and their copy of your receipt (I think) into a pneumatic tube and shoot it elsewhere in the building, which I personally consider very cool. Once that's done you take your copy of the receipt and go stand at the pick-up counter, and the droids who sort through the remains of Jabba's discarded servitors in the basement send stuff up a belt, identified with the receipt copies that've been sent to them. You claim your item there.

I came home with an AMD Athlon XP 3200 processor, which waited fifteen minutes before I installed it in Mace- I'd just walked home in the cold and didn't want the contacts to have weird temperature problems. It took forever to get the fan into place on the CPU, but I did eventually. And now Mace has an even better brain than I intended for her from the beginning. I'm probably going to have to back up my data from the HD and format it and reinstall Windows, because she still can't get over the missing drive that used to be on IDE 0 and insists on having a CD in the drive before she'll let me boot, but that's okay. I'll deal. She's a damn sweet mover and that makes me happy.

*The collected J&R stores take up an entire city block near City Hall. They're all individually huge. And they've just added a personal-care items store; I am not making that up.

Comments

[quintus.livejournal.com]

because she still can't get over the missing drive that used to be on IDE 0 and insists on having a CD in the drive before she'll let me boot

To my tired and headachey brain that has more than a whiff of the BIOS about it, depending on when it has a hissy about the absent CD?

[camwyn]

That's why I flushed the BIOS yesterday, but it didn't change the problem. The hissy comes RIGHT as the machine is looking for boot devices, after it's done the IRQs and such.

[quintus.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, that's still in the pre-OS section of the sequence isn't it?
No chance that there's not some odd combination of jumper settings that's making the IDE devices act like that? I'm just peeing in the wind here at second remove but I'm not sure reinstalling windows will sort that.

If the HDD is set on 'cable select' and is on the same IDE cable as the CD that could make it act a bit like that if they're in the wrong physical order on the lead.

Head hurts, stopping thinking now.

[camwyn]

The drive I'm trying to boot from is a SATA and it's basically considered controller #2 out of the 0 - 1 - 2. The original boot drive was a regular IDE on controller 0; the CD drive is secondary master on controller 1. There's a different boot drive in the controller 0 primary master slot now, which is in fact the drive I used as primary master on my old computer, but that doesn't seem to have changed anything.

Have told the bios that the SATA drive is to be considered first in all things. Still no workee.

[ocean-song.livejournal.com]

Congrats on the new processor. Hope it helps your problems! Personal care products? Now that's just weird!

meahwhile, I LOVE those vaccuum tube systems. We saw one in a house we were looking at, when we first moved to California (built in the 70's) I fully intend to have one when I build my own house, along with a train that runs along the ceiling, a trapeeze, water-heated pipes running under the floors so my feet are never cold, enormous clawfoot baths in multiple places, my own kiln, and a bunch o other oddities.

Miss ya!
xxxooo

[camwyn]

Well, Mace boots up quickly and didn't seem to have much trouble with Sims 2 at all. At this point what I mostly need is to get the boot-up foo fixed and then I'll be golden.

[ocean-song.livejournal.com]

And this is all about the Sims? Ha ha ha! ;)

*adores you*

[camwyn]

If it weren't for my video games and DVD watching I'd never need to upgrade. Word 97 handles most of what I need, and with a web browser and a MUSH client and an IM client, there's not a lot of system drain. For Sims and Morrowind and Civ III I need more power. Hell, I built Victor originally so I could play Civilization: Call to Power.

[ymfaery]

Hee~! I still use Word 97 on my laptop that I bought in 1998. :D :D :D

I really should talk to my brother about his desktop that runs Win98SE. I have video capture equipment that I couldn't find WinXP drivers for and his desktop's been having funny problems after his daughters (9 and 5) got to it. *sigh*