by El Zorro Viejo (aka; Jim)

It all begins with the digital camera I got for my birthday. It seems that most of the software associated with this machine is incompatible with Windows NT (which is what I've been running for the last five years.) To overcome this problem, I decided to break down and install XP on my 'puter. Unfortunately, I found that I needed to upgrade my RAM (no problemo...done in a heartbeat) and add a second HD as my old 13gig drive was getting somewhat full, and I heard that XP needs all sorts of elbow room. Again, no problemo (hah!)...I find a nice Western Digital 80gig drive for very few bucks, and I plunk it into the box only to find that my ancient BIOS doesn't recognize it.

And this is where the real trouble begins. I search down Award BIOS to find it has been taken over by Phoenix. I do the dance and, the last Monday in October, am the proud owner of a brand new Flash BIOS which is guaranteed to work. I proceed with the Flash upgrade, doing all the recommended backups of the original system on the chip...only to receive a notice that the product I'm trying to Flash is incompatible with the chip in the machine. Now, at this point the Flash upgrade process has been chugging along for a bit...doing backups and other things...so I'm not 100% sure that the original BIOS hasn't already been wiped in preparation for the new installation. So, to be safe, I restore the backed up BIOS. Disaster!!

When the machine reboots, all I get are beeps...no video. I can't see what is going on in there...I immediately call Tech Support who allows as how I shouldn't have done anything when I saw the first error message. At that point, the original BIOS was still intact on the chip. The upcome of all this was that they would send me a new chip with the new BIOS already installed. Peachy! Except that it was coming via US Mail and that meant 3-4 days in transit. So I wait...and wait...and wait...

At last! The new chip is here...I plug it in, turn the machine on and....SNAP!...something blows and there is only silence and darkness. I am, to say the least, aghast. Anyhow, I trundle off to work at this point with visions of utter disaster swirling in my head. When I got home from work, I immediately started taking things apart to see if there was anything blatantly obvious...and there was. There, in the power ssupply was--a blown fuse. Hallelujah! It is a fuse! I can fix that. Off to the electronics store and a new fuse...or box thereof. Home...fuse in...plug it in and SNAP!. Shit!

So, Monday (the earliest time the computer shop was open) I take the machine in to see if it is, in fact, the power source or if there is something fried on the Motherboard. I had visions of buying a new machine if the board was toasted. And the verdict....power supply. So, I buy a new power supply get it all installed and all, plug the machine in and...yea! it's working...it's working...it's crashed...crashed? Huh? Seems that it would get to where it begins loading NT and then something was fried in that software. It would do a core memory dump and then recycle to the boot phase again. Long and short: I had to make the old HD the slave, make the new drive the master and do a clean install of XP. Doing that ended the problem and brought up a new one. When one does a clean install, none of your old software is brought over to the new OS. So now I have to go through the old drive, pick the apps I was using, move their files over to the new drive and then reinstall them. I'm finding that about 50% of them will treat the reinstall like an update and keep my settings and all. The other 50% is giving me working programs without any of my settings etc.. My problem is that there are some programs which I don't think are going to port to the XP environment. I have already found that my Paperport Vx has become a paperweight. (This means that I'm going to have to spring for a new scanner in the near future. Rats!) But the good news is that I'm up and connected again.

Finally, to add insult to injury, the camera which started all this is suddenly not working right. I don't know what has happened, but I will need to take it in to get the damn thing fixed. There are times I look fondly on the long distant past...when things were simpler.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. ©El Zorro Viejo 2002-2005