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.
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.
Topic: Stupid OLD tech PC hardware (Read 793 times)