by El Zorro Viejo (aka; Jim)

Yes, it is here. The newest machine in a line that goes back to an Apple //e purchase a little more than 20 years ago has arrived. Now, this is a particularly difficult transition since it was, essentially, totally unplanned. The old machine (as I have mentioned before) died as I was reaching for the keyboard to do something. So, this transition has all the earmarks of...panic--Yep, panic works...

The first glitch showed up when I opened the new machine's case. It seems that Dell, in its wisdom, has decided that it does not need to support "old" technology. There was not an IDE controller on the motherboard...at least not one that I could use. There is an IDE controller, but it is used for the CD-ROM drive(s). There there is a connector for a 3.5" floppy drive (which is not a standard component), but nothing for that legacy hard drive. Now, my life was on my 6 month old Western Digital 80gig IDE hard drive. I had just(October) spent a good week moving all my shit onto that drive, but, as the machine stood, I had no way of accessing that drive. (Remember, the old machine was dead, and my back-ups are all old/slow P-1's and P-2's--the fastest of which is the 233Mhz machine. None of them has a BIOS which will recognize an 80gig drive.) Well, I was devastated. Here I had this machine which has a 3Ghz CPU, 512Meg RAM, an 80gig SATA HD and (potentially) another 80gig on my IDE drive, but it was useless unless that "potential" was realized.

Well, to make a long story short, while I was crying over the phone to my daughter and her...damn! I never know what to call him; significant other? sounds dumb, boyfriend? sounds like they are in high school...*sigh*...John when he suggested controller cards. In my panic, I had totally forgotten they make such a thing. So, another $47 and I at least could connect the IDE drive. Now, I gotta tell you that, for a high-end machine, this Dell has a couple design flaws that I think are huge. First, there is that IDE issue. I cannot believe that I am the only person in the world who needed to transfer the old HD. Then there is the bay issue: there aren't enough. Right now, I've added a CD-R/W drive, a 3.5" floppy and the IDE HD (all canabalized from the old machine), and there are literally no bays left. Also, I added the IDE controller card and had a Sound Blaster card ordered with the machine (I wanted the sound off the Mother Board and handled by a dedicated card) which leaves me with exactly one PCI slot for a modem (should I want one.) Speaking of the modem, I can't use any of my old modem cards because they're all ISA and, you guessed it, there aren't any ISA slots on this machine.

So, I have the sucker up and running. The flat panel monitor is cool. I love that. And it is faster than greased lightning; I'm now turning out a SETI work unit every day rather than every week or so (of course, I have SETI now set to work 24/7 instead of only when the screen saver was on, so that makes a difference.) Now I'm in the process of reinstalling all my software. That is a true pain-in-the-butt. Plus, I have another gripe: I can't install my XP Pro. Seems that this version of XP Home is newer than my version of Pro, and the Pro CD won't let me install it. When I try to install by booting from the CD, it won't recognize either the SATA drive or the IDE card/drive combo so it won't install because it can't access the drives. AAAARRRRGGGHHH!! I have to call Microsoft and see what they can do. I want the added functionality of Pro, but Home will do for the meantime...

OK, gotta run...I have some photography software to install (Snapfish, Flickr and all the stuff that came with my Canon digital camera...) As this soap opera unfolds, I will keep the updates coming. If nothing else, it gives you the chance to think, "thank God that isn't me!" *grin*

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