https://www.posetteforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=3438&p=41144#p41144 ----------------------------------- GrouchoCaesar Thursday, 12 March 2009, 09:51 PM Re: The Twelve Tasks Of Grouchales ----------------------------------- Number 6 ANYA March 11th 2009, 8:40AM Oh dear... where to begin? Anya[sup]1[/sup] started off life as an H/P Pavillion 6040a that was very unwisely bought by my former flat-mate. Unwise, because it was sold as a Vista-Capable PC when it was clearly incapable of running Vista at all well. Worse still, H/P being the very unhelpful sods that they are were only willing to provide Vista drivers for the hardware. So I hunted them down for my flatemate, downgraded the machine happily to XP, where it worked quite well, and left him to burn the hard-won XP drivers to disk for safe-keeping. After the December '08 quake, the H/P started having issues with the DVD burner. It was under warranty, but to replace it (or even to do something as simple as fit more RAM in to his computer) the chain store he bought it from said they would have to send it to Australia to have it done. Cue copious amounts of disbelief and swearing... Deciding to do it himself, he bought a nice new Pioneer DVD burner. Guess what? It wouldn't fit properly in the H/P case without removing the fascia on the new burner, and the flap on the PC that the original burner was hidden under when not in use. Removing the facsia to fit the burner also removed the burner's eject button, so he could only eject discs via software. (There was an eject button on his keyboard, but that refused to work under XP even with XP drivers for that keyboard!) The final ignomy came when he bought a mid-range video card to fit in his machine... and it didn't. Because the power supply was too puny, and H/P had designed the case in such a way that no normal PSU could fit inside without blocking the PCIe slot. So no new PSU, card won't go; new PSU, card won't fit! When the Lotto thing happened, I gave my flat-mate $10,000 - and he announced he was moving to Melbourne, Australia. I offered to buy some of his toys off of him to give him a little more cash and give him less things to have to ship over there, and amongst other stuff I ended up with his H/P, and the new video card. With all the other neat techno-treats I was acquiring, the little H/P just sat untouched in the corner of my office once we moved to my new home. Then, a little after Christmas, I decided to deal with this little PC once and for all. Even though it was a badly designed package, the heart of the machine is not too shabby - it is a dual core 3.2 Ghz system after all. So I went and bought a new generic case for it, and tore apart all the useless H/P cruft that they had thrown in. Gone was the H/P Pocket Drive and the Card Readers, gone was the nasty looking case and inconvenienty placed front USB and sound slots... ...and I found another really aggravating problem. Thanks to a really bad motherboard design, the thing barely fits into a mid-range case. It protrudes in such a way that you have to be extremely careful where you put any 3.5" hard disks, never mind the 5.25" burner. And the final, fatal flaw? A big capacitor that sits in the way of any long-form video card. You just can't fit a powerful card into the system. So my idea of using this machine for gaming had to be thrown away.[sup]2[/sup] I would have binned Anya then and there, but then I realised I could use her to provide a solution to a problem I have with my DVD authoring software. I have an old Pioneer DVD burner that has issues - it will burn DVD discs fine, but won't read any DVD's it has written. Yet it will read CDs - pressed and burnt, and pressed DVDs as well, which is quite odd. But the thing is, the burner came with some very useful software - DVD Lab, and TMPGEc 2.5 both of which are perfect for my uses. But both are linked specifically to that burner. If it's not installed, they won't run, full stop. Now, when I first acquired Anya, we were still living at our city apartment, and still had the net. In an unusual bit of foresight, I realised I had to obtain a copy of XP to run on Anya. But how? Microsoft in their "wisdom" stopped all sales of XP from retailers a while back. I thought for a few seconds and came up with what modesty forbids me from claiming is a genius idea. I went on the net, Googled "XP PRO KEYS", and used the key to install a copy of XP Pro on an old junker PC. I logged on to Windows Update... and waited. Windows Update loaded up the WGA software, which promptly said "Hey... you're not running a genuine copy of XP. ...um, would you like to?" I click on yes, haul out my debit card, and sure enough, Microsoft sells me a copy of XP Pro, mails me my new key, and sends an installation disc to me in the post in due course. Cunning or what?!? I don't activate or register my new copy of XP, of course, because I'll just have to re-activate it when eventually I install it on Anya. Once Anya is in her new case, I start to install XP Pro on her, and hit a real big hurdle. Drivers. When my flat-mate burnt the disk of drivers I had so carefully obtained for him, the prat didn't bother to verify the disk he burnt... or even the Vista recover disks he also burnt. Turned out that the DVD burner that came with his system had been flawed from the day he bought it. Ah, well, fine. I'm due to get my broadband on soon, so I'll just finish what I can and put Anya to one side... Cue this morning. I hunt down all of the required drivers, I assemble all of her bits, hook in the Ethernet cable, boot her up... and start swearing. Why? Because it took so long for me to get my broadband that it went over the 30 days that Microsoft gives to to activate an installation of XP! So all I see is the "Activate Now?" screen. And to activate requires a working LAN port. Which requires a LAN driver. Which is sitting on a 8 Gb flash drive on my desk. Which will only be able to be installed once I'm logged in. Which will only happen when I activate Windows. Which requires a working LAN port... AAAARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!! Anyway... Anya is now finally up and running after I flattened her HHD and re-installed XP Pro a couple of hours ago. And she's working sweet now. I have a few 120 Gb PATA drives hanging around, so I threw one in her to supplement the 320 Gb SATA that came with her. That should be good enough to fit some raw video or animation data on. Anya's Vital Statistics Frankensteined H/P Pavillion 6040a PC Intel duel-core Pentuim D 3.20 Ghz 2 Gb RAM Intel G45 Extreme Graphics 2 chipset (shudder) Samsung LA22A450 20" LCD TV 120 Gb PATA HDD 320 Gb SATA HDD XP Professional [sup]1[/sup] I christened her Anya, because the name fits in with the Buffy theme I've got going on with my latest PC names, and because the machine is an ex-demon from hell now doing good things... [sup]2[/sup] Not that I need another gaming machine - Big Red, or Jessica to give her her proper name, takes care of all my gaming need and then some... but her story is still to come...