...but for a while it looked like it might not.

Let me tell you a story. A month or more back I bought a bunch of stuff to put together a new machine:
- ABit KG-7-RAID MB
- AMD Athlon 1.4GHz
- 4x256MB registered DDR SDRAM
- 30GB ATA100 EIDE HD
- Pioneer DVD-116 ATA66 EIDE DVD-ROM
- IOmega 250MB EIDE ZIP drive
- Creative Labs SoundBlaster Live!5.1 w/ Live!Drive IR
- 3Com PCI 10/100 Etherlink
- nVidia GeForce2 Ultra 64MB AGP video
- Full tower case with 300W power supply
- WinME
- Red Hat 7.1 Deluxe Workstation

To add to this I had some bits from previous machines
- 30GB ATA100 EIDE HD
- 6GB EIDE HD (old, probably ATA33, maybe ATA66)
- Adaptec Fast/Wide SCSI card
- IOmega 2GB SCSI internal Jaz drive
- Dell P1110 21" Trinitron
- Altec Lansing 3 speaker (L/R/sub) system
- 104 key keyboard
- Logitech TrackMan Marble+

My plan was to create a dual-boot box to play games on (WinME) and to develop on (Linux). But before I got around to putting it all together I got busy with a couple of small jobs - being unemployed any money is good money. But that occupied me for most of three weeks, four counting the week after which was spent catching up on email, news, forums, etc., that had stacked up while I was busy away from the net.

But Monday I decided to get on with it, in part to get on with updating the forums. So I spent Monday night putting the box together, which wasn't too hard.

Tuesday was the day I'd wire it into my work area and install things. Well, it didn't work that way. When powered on it just beeped. No POST. Nothing but BEEP-BEEP-BEEP... That's not a good sign. So I worked on it for a while and it just wasn't happening. So I started pulling things out of it to see if it was a card or something. I got it down to MB, CPU, RAM, and video and it still had the same beep. Just MB, RAM, and CPU - same beep. So I decided to pull the heatsink and CPU. No beep. Ok. Then I did something very, very dumb.

I put the CPU back in and turned the box on.

Note I did not say I put the CPU *AND HEATSINK* back in.

Do you know how fast a 1.4GHz T-Bird core Athlon will fry itself without a heatsink? Here's a hint: Don't blink, you'll miss it.

Of course, I realized what I was doing as I did it - which was too late. After that even with the CPU in, no beeps.

Ok, I figured the CPU was dead - but I had no way to know for sure if it was the CPU or the MB.

Then my buddy Jer volunteered to play 'swap the CPU' with his 1.4Ghz box. So I trucked my box from Waltham to Worcester. We took my CPU and put it in his box - nothing. Pretty much confirming my CPU was fried.

Then we put his CPU in my box - and it beeped again. Ok, so back to where we started. We couldn't figure it out, so I decided I'd give up and take it to a small repair shop a few blocks from my house. So we put my CPU back in my box.

Then we put Jer's CPU back in his box - and nothing happened. After many attempts to sort it out, it was still dead. I seemed to have a killer touch.

I, of course, felt like a total asshole for managing to fry a good friend's box while he was trying to help me. I hate breaking other people's stuff. Jer was cool about it, he just wants it fixed. But I still felt lame. And, of course I was already stressed out and a bit depressed over my box being broken in a mysterious way.

So now I trucked both boxes back to Waltham with me. On Wednesday I took them into the local repair shop. They called me up shortly after I brought them in to tell me *both* CPUs were dead - mine was fried, as expected, and Jer's was physically cracked. It must have happened when getting his heatsink back on - it was a real pain to get latched. They said it wasn't too unusual to happen with the Athlon, they'd done it themselves building systems.

Great.

Well, they had a new Athlon XP 1600+ (that's the Palomino core @ 1.4GHz for the non-chipheads) that my MB would handle with a BIOS upgrade. And they turned up a Thunderbird core 1.4GHz chip for Jer's box - which is the same as it had been running. Ok, so I had them go ahead and install them.

Wednesday night I schlepped Jer's box back to Worcester. We connected it and turned it on, and it booted fine. Great.

Except that it would hang after a random period of time, in both Linux and Win2K. After much consternation it remained broken. So I hauled it back to Waltham. The repair center has been closed for the holidays, but it'll go back once they're open again. And I feel lame for not having it fixed yet...

So, onto my box. After I got home I was nervous about it - afterall, we thought Jer's box was ok. So I tried to do my install.

I installed WinME and it went ok. Then I tried to install the video drivers that came with the card. Reboot - and suddenly WinME was broken. Out of memory errors, and other bizarreness. Ok, I redid the install, and tried again. Now Windows would start - but NOTHING was running. Ctrl-Alt-Del would bring up the program manager box - which was empty. I tried this several more times with no luck. I tried installing the drivers from the CD, I tried letting WinME look for them (it would find them online), and I tried downloading the latest from nVidia. No luck.

I tried it with first installing the AMD AGP miniport drivers that came with the system, and without. I tried it with the current version downloaded from AMD's website. I tried it with, and without, installing the PCI-to-AGP bridge drivers. Basically I tried every combination I could think of, working all night, growing increasingly frustrated, and not getting anywhere.

Halfway through this I tossed in the RH7.1 disks and did a generic workstation install - which went perfectly, recognized the card, and let me set things as high as 1600x1200. So it didn't seem to be the HW.

After posting this on a private news server I share with friends, a few of them replied that WinME had driver problems and that was probably it. Ok, I gave up in disgust and frustration and went to bed.

Thanksgiving wasn't a fun day. I spent most of it home alone, but that's not pertinent here. I don't care for the holiday mainly due to personal history. I did make attempts at the install again, but it was just as fruitless as before. My friend Rat emailed me to volunteer to come over Friday with various Windows install media to try.

So Friday he showed up with Win98SE and Win2K Pro install discs.

First we tried Win98SE - and we got the same results. Everything was fine, until you tried to install the video drivers. At that point we figured the 98/ME AGP miniport of PCI-AGP bridge driver must be broken.

So we tried Win2K.

It worked.

Let me say that again.

It worked.

It recognized the hardware and the drivers worked. Larger resolutions and true color worked. Golden.

Emboldened by this we (Rat, Gryphon, and I) decided to head out for dinner - and to buy a copy of WinXP Home Edition for my box. Yes, I actually do buy software and don't use warez. (Ok, ok, *most* of the time... nearly all.) I also decided to bag a copy of Norton AntiVirus for XP - remember folks, don't run a machine without it.

So, after feasting at California Pizza Kitchen (*plug*), we returned home and did the final install. WinXP on one HD, RH7.1 on the other - with the small HD mounter under RH as a kind of sratch space. Dual booting is working. Both OSes have been updated. And I'm posting this from NS4.79 under WinXP.

I am very, very relieved to finally have this damn thing working. It has meant spending several hundred dollars, which I don't really have to spend, though it does mean I have a slightly faster CPU than I started with. And a lot of time wasted. But now I can actually try to get some work done.

I'm not fully relieved, since Jer's box remains to be fixed, but at least something has gone right. (Knock on wood.)

And that has been my week...

-MegaZone, megazone@megazone.org
Personal Homepage http://www.megazone.org/
Eyrie Productions FanFic http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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