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Non Gaming Discussions => Off-Topic => Topic started by: Coredweller on August 22, 2002, 08:01:00 PM

Title: Stupid OLD tech PC hardware
Post by: Coredweller on August 22, 2002, 08:01:00 PM
I built this PC for a friend back in 1995 or 1996, and he hasn\'t upgraded it since!  He\'s poor, and never saw the need to "waste money" on another PC.  Well naturally since I built it for him, he expects me to keep on maintaining indefinitely.  AAARRRGGGHHH it\'s driving me crazy. (https://psx5central.com/community/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2F216.40.241.68%2Fcontrib%2Fdvv%2Fpo.gif&hash=b86547adf6a69b6f1fd58d3c9b29eb34e56ebfd6) (https://psx5central.com/community/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.uniquehardware.co.uk%2Fserver-smilies%2Fcontrib%2Fruinkai%2Fscreama.gif&hash=27ccf34d659d52035aa3495233adc77b817b47ea)(https://psx5central.com/community/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gamers-forums.com%2Fsmilies%2Fups%2Frazor_wind%2Fmadani.gif&hash=571b8561b31504c19c664b587f78dd6402e79a99)

It\'s a Pentium (1!!!) 133 mhz on an Asus P/I P55T2P4 board, with 16 megs of ram, a crappy old 2D video card, and until recently a 1.2 Gig hard drive.  A while back I upgraded him to Win98SE, which he needed... but the machine was struggling with it.  One day recently he tried to install IE 6 on this thing, and of course the OS crashed and wouldn\'t reboot.  I tried everything and then resigned myself to wiping the drive and reinstalling everything.

Not as easy as that, I found out.  After wiring the old Western Digital drive to another PC to back up the contents, I then reconnected it, and the mobo wouldn\'t recognize the drive.  I was baffled.  WTF?  It\'s got one drive in master setting on primary IDE channel... what\'s the problem?  I tried everything.  I flashed BIOS to the newest available version long ago.  I have like seven hard drives lying around, so I tried some of them, and the only one the BIOS would recognize in master setting was an old Quantum 420 meg.  Finally I figured out that I could wire the 420 as master, and another 6 gig as slave, and it would recognize both of them.  Now the long road of reinstalling the OS begins.

I\'ve gotten too used to everything just working the first time.  I had almost forgotten about the bad old days when nothing ever worked right the first time, and you always had to play around with everything to get it to work.  I swear, my support of this PC ends after this project.
Title: Stupid OLD tech PC hardware
Post by: Kurt Angle on August 24, 2002, 02:06:16 AM
You shouldn\'t have wasted your time.

Just tell him it\'s knackered and he needs to buy a new one!