Absolute Missions

Okay this is my last proper post before the exams (unless I write another :P). Thought I’d talk about some computer thing so I warn you now! If you don’t understand something the best thing to do is just put the name at the end of a wikipedia url for example bios: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS will be the url for the explanation of a BIOS.

Day 1 Dad comes home with a PC he’d bought for work a while ago and wants a general service (new Hard Disk, format and install OS and applications etc). I take a look at it and I’m like hold up, this is better then our my PC. He isn’t really bothered, says as long as he goes back to work with a working PC he’ll be happy (wow, unusual). So chuffed as I was I had what appeared to be a small task ahead of me. What does it involve, well firstly we (me and my brother) cleaned up our PC. The best thing about being forced to format your PC (running nasty windows) is the fact that you are of course forced to clean up all the junk, and my we had a lot of junk. Spent hours cleaning up directories and moving it all to our slave drive ( C:- 80GB had Windows and F: - 120GB was file storage). So that was a bit of a mission, yeah nothing too hardcore just general.

Ok first thing I thought I’d do once our data was backed up safely on another drive was to transfer our new DVD RW (16x) into the new PC and move the one from there into the old one. The bad thing about small compact PC’s is that they are extremely annoying to get into - and this one is no exception. First thing we had to figure out was how to get the front of the case off. Your supposed to be able to pull the front off the drive bay cover off but of course that wasn’t happening. We took the PSU (power supply) and the cpu fan out of the PC so that we had a bit more space to work around. After finally getting breaking off the drive bay cover we made the transfer. So far so good.
I hate working in the pre-OS purgatory!
Day 2: Time for a bit of shopping. We made a trip down to MicroDirect and purchased a few parts just to bring the Advent T9 (our new pc) up to speed:

• 300 GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10 lead free 7200rpm 16MB ATA133 - Yeah not amazing but surprisingly cheap and it will do the job.
• Exlixir 512MB DDR400 PC3200 RAM - Again cheap and good enough

And of course some blank DVDs and CDs since were there.

Now to make the hard disk transfer. I thought it’d be easy enough to stick the new drive into the new PC, format and install windows from there. Not happening, not matter how much I messed around in the bios I couldn’t get it to run my Windows XP CD. Great. What I usually do when I encounter such a problem is to go for the old skool floppies. Looking at the new pc I realise that there is one flaw in modern day computers and yep - that is the lack of a floppy drive. So I go and rip out a floppy outta another pc I have lying around and connect it up and guess what - it doesn’t work. I then tried the FDD from another PC and had the same result. Multiple attempts and more fiddling in the bios and we’re still at stage one. Remember that this is over a period of hours, and it’s times like this when you really want to give up! It was at this point that I say to someone on MSN, “I hate working in the pre-OS purgatory!”.

So I’m thinking and finally I decided to transfer the HD back to the other PC. Amazing - the CD will not run. Cursing Windows XP we go for the boot disks. Strangely there is some I/O error with the Windows boot up disks but the good old Windows 98 boot disk got me into the command prompt. Using the nasty fdisk tools I partioned and formatted the HD, a few more hours. Thinking that all is good now I transfer back the HD to the new PC, I wanted to install XP from there just to make sure all the hardware is recognised. Boot up and guess what, XP CD works. Great, we get to the stage where you can choose the partition and yes - there is a problem. The new drive was showing as 130GB, that’s half of what it actually is. Figuring it might just be a miscalculation in XP I go through the installation anyway with a quick NTFS format. Booting up into a fresh XP and unfortunately XP wasn’t just being stupid - it still showed as 130GB. Where is the other 170GB?! HD comes out again and into the other PC. Trying the setup in there was no better, XP still showed it as 130GB. Searching on forums was great - really - when people think that all your problems revolve around something being physically damaged it really makes you feel great, especially when your 99% sure that there is nothing broken. So we work around it and finally after like a hundred different things (more hours) we find the culprit - an old XP CD (no service packs) was causing this. I tried another one of our XP CD’s which had come with SP1 and it showed it as a full 289GB. Great, time to get going. We installed XP onto there and we were finally getting somewhere.

Day 3: Well from now on it is more or less straight forward. Well yeah, it would be if you have a CD with drivers on it. Advent (yak) had provided some nasty recovery CD which would only work if you used the recovery console. My dad strongly advised against it from a past experience from that. Ironically the ethernet driver wasn’t even recognised so I had to find that on the other PC and then onto my SD card and into the new PC (i’m loving built in memory card readers). So once were here I’m searching high and low for drivers. It really doesn’t help when the manufacturer of that piece of hardware has a rubbish website with no drivers and it feels like you’re the only one with a ‘Prism’ wireless card. After getting all the drivers, and yes it was a mission, I decided to compile a pack with drivers for anyone with an Advent T9, you can download it here. Finally we got our software installed and sorted out the drives and yes, we’re finally done! Well actually, after finished we tried out our Creative Inspire 6700 speakers on the built in sound (which claims to be 7.1) and we weren’t completely impressed. Convinced that I required the best hardware we moved the great Creative Audigy2 ZS 7.1 card into the new PC (had to move around the exisiting PCI cards how annoying).

And finally Time to sit back and see what we’ve gained:

Yep, and of course there are a few more things like the nifty little case which is a lot more attractive then the big Dell (although admittedly less accessible). The extra ports on the front especially rock, with all of my card readers, audio ports, firewire and USB. Interestingly this PC also has a scart socket in the back. Yeah, I know I might never use it but that is really cool. Other things, the Dell 8200 ran a motherboard with RDRAM. Yeah - that now pretty much obeslete form of memory which is practically non-upgradable (unless you have a few hundred quid). Now with this new PC we have a much easier ability to upgrade the ram up to 4GB. Another problem with the Dell 8200 was that the AGP slot was 4x so it wasn’t making the best use of the graphics card. This one is 8x which is much better. Of course with PCI-Express now the standard that is really the only step left to get this PC into higher action.

And if your interested from the screenshot, we are running the Vista Transformation pack which is really cool (and with this ram it is not much of a memory hog). Time to update the ‘My Rig’ page!

1. guess who! Says:
   April 22nd, 2006 at 10:52 pm

   1 word…WOW! youv’e got a lot of talent. and patience masha Allah , shame about the car in the background tho!

2. shaima Says:
   April 28th, 2006 at 3:15 pm

   salaamz!
   i must say man.. mashaalah at such a young age u no soo much :oops::)
   hope u do well in yo examz i got mine to :mad::(
   may Allah make it easy for us …..:idea:
   take care akhi
   ur sis
   shaima:cool: