September 27, 2002

Hardware updates

The hardware I ordered from newegg arrived on Wednesday, exactly as advertised. I’ve been very happy with their service – they have a good website with excellent information, good prices and selection and at every step they let you know what’s going on. Highly recommended. (And thanks to Jeremy for the pointer.)

All the hardware installed ok. I was a little annoyed with the CPU fan because I had to go to the manufacturer's website to see that you're supposed to use a screwdriver to get the last clip on, but whatever. I also had a little scare because I thought I'd lost the WinXP packaging which had the key code stuck on it.

Installing WinXP was pretty trivial, although for some reason it thinks that the ATAPI Zip drive is C: even though it's installed on the second IDE bus. Go figure. So the boot/system drive is E: and the data/programs drive is F:. XP doesn't seem to care so neither do I -- drive letters are so archaic anyway :-)

I'm trying to still use my two Voodoo2 cards for 3D graphics -- I don't play very many games, and the ones I do play are sufficiently old that they shouldn't require anything made after the year 2000. A quick check of Half-Life with their included 3dfx mini driver seemed to bode well, but I'm not sure about games that rely on DirectX (or Direct3D, or whatever it's called). We'll see. I may have to break down in a while and just grab whatever 3D card the kids were using yesterday.

The only other problem I'm having is that XP doesn't seem to be able to see (or authenticate?) to my workstation running Samba, but I just tried it late last night and didn't have the motivation to troubleshoot.

So the last task is to take the bad hard drive out of the old machine, mount it in the new one and grab anything I've forgotten to copy over. Sweet.

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