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December 25, 2001 on 7:09 am | In Main |Merry Christmas everyone — hope to have two posts today since I didn’t have time last night.
The reason I didn’t have time to post last night was because I was busy working on the new computer. I have been swapping the keyboard, video, and mouse cables back and forth between the new computer and old computer. I bought a KVM switch, but I don’t want to install it until after everything is working with the new computer. After lots of fun assembling the new computer, at least the hardware is working. If making mistakes is a learning experience, I learned quite a few things yesterday. It took my three tries to get the fan/heat sink mounted on the motherboard properly. It also took two tries each to attach the motherboard to the case and to install all of the drives. In the case of the motherboard, I installed one of the standoffs in the wrong position. My initial thought was to leave it, but the I wondered what would happen if one of the brass standoffs came into contact with a conductor on the motherboard, so I decided to take out all of the other screws and fix it. In the case of the hard drive, I mounted it upside down. I guess it would work like this, but I wanted the cables to be routed neatly, so I fixed that. In the case of the dvd-rom and floppy drives, I didn’t have them extended out far enough to be flush with the front bezel. At least I was pleased to see the computer successfully boot up into the bias the first time I powered it on. The floppy drive was initially not working, but after re-seating the connectors, it now works. What is been most frustrating is the hard drive. The bios reports the correct size, 80Gb, but both the dos fdisk and included disk software either reports 8Gb or 10Gb. I thought I could just format to the smaller size, install windows, then repartition the drive, but the system hangs up whenever I try to format the drive. My next step is to install the drive as a slave in the old computer, then try to partition and format it from there. The included software has different software for windows than for dos, which I hope will make a difference. Also, I will have the advantage of a fully working computer to perform the format, and that won’t need rebooting every time I make a change to the drive.
We picked Cortney’s parents up at the airport yesterday. They are staying with us through New Year’s. We all went out to dinner on the way home from the airport, and then went for a nice walk outside to see the Christmas lights on the houses in the neighborhood. I thought the walk was nice, but apparently the weather was a little brisk for travelers used to the more tropical weather in South Florida. Sean was so excited to see his grandparents that we kept him up past his normal bed time.
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