posted
Yesterday, at about 6:30PM, I bought a new CD-RW drive. It's a real nice and shiny one, too. This morning, I woke up in a good mood, thinking to myself, "Woohoo! I got a nifty cd drive to install.", and other nice things. For some dumbass reason, I decide to install the drive upstairs. So I take the tower to my bedroom and place it on my bed. I go back downstairs to get all the parts it came with. Back in my room, I sit on the bed, and the damn tower falls on the ground. I'm like, "Oh crap!". I pick it up and I hear something inside moving ("!@#%$"). A RAM chip came out of place. I spend the next three minutes trying to put the thing back in.
Then I notice some little wire is unhooked near the CPU. I basically know what area it goes to, but there are two sets of places I can put it, so I just pick one. I bring the computer back downstairs and hook it up and boot it, hoping I didn't completely screw the thing up by dropping it. I wait for the LILO Boot Loader to pop up...but it doesn't. Instead it goes straight to Linux. I log in and am greeted with the nifty message of the day (it was a Star Trek quote...). Anyway, I didn't want to go to Linux, so I reboot. This time I notice that only one of my drives is loading
I open the tower up yet again and look around. I notice that a cable going to the motherboard from the hard drives isn't connected all the way...I proceed to press in back in. I reboot again, and the hard drives all load, but this time, the floppy drive isn't loading. I check the omputer's guts again and notice that the power cable for the floppy must have just popped out when I connected the hard drives. I reboot yet again.
Everything is fine, and LILO is working, so I happily choose to load DOS. At the point where Explorer is suppose to load, nothing happens. All that opens is Norton AntiVirus and WinAmp ("WTF?!!"). I open Norton and browse my files so I can open up another shell. I decided to play a fine selection of "gangsta rap" mp3s and replace all the registry and ini files with a backup from last night.
Guess what? Yep, I rebooted again. This time, everything works just fine and dandy, and Windows loads all the way. So, this is as good a time as any to install my new cd drive. I'm pretty happy now. After an hour of constant swearing, I now have a new working cd drive, oh joy. Now all I need to do it get my mouse to work in Linux.
...all this from someone who has been using computers since 1992
posted
Don't feel too badly, my boy. When I have a freshman in high school (or thereabouts) I bought a CD-ROM drive to install in my computer. Well, I installed it, and when I booted up the computer the damn sparked and smoked. I thought I had really screwed my computer over. Turns out it was just a defective drive. Still, there's nothing like seeing your baby breath fire at you like a dragon.
------------------ "Some people call me the Space Cowboy. Yeah! Some call me the Gangster of Love. Some people call me Maurice. Whoo hoo! 'Cause I speak of the Pompatus of Love!" - Steve Miller Band's The Joker
posted
You know, there are children born today who will grow up in a world where installing new hardware will take 5 seconds, and be as easy as using a toaster.
I spoke to a 15 year-old the other day who couldn't remember the Sinclair Spectrum.
Someone else couldn't get a budget game to load. I told them to try DOS. They asked what DOS was. I don't know, the youth of today.
------------------ 'Saying it in a stacato voice doesn't make it any more true' -Stewart Lee
and replace all the registry and ini files with a backup from last night.
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