On the road again...

We were pulling out onto the highway before I remembered that I'd not told most of the folks that I was NJ bound this weekend. I've got very limited access via my father-in-law's computer and an erratic dialup...

I've got 'access' to it because the WinME installation on it is so hopelessly smash that it takes effort to boot it and keep it running. Had I realized that the 'having a few problems' was going to mean a complete reinstall of it, I would've brought more in the way of utility software with me. After 7.5 hours of work, I've -finally- got ME behaving enough to download the disk images for Win NT; my boot disks were destroyed when I rearranged my setup at home, and since I had no immediate use for them, I didn't bother to make another set. Silly me.

*pounds her head on the counter* FIC VA-503+ with a Cyrix M-II 300 processor... not a speed demon, but it's solid when it's running properly. Unfortunately, it's currently installed with WinME... which means 'running properly' just flat out isn't going to happen. At any rate, I'm pretty much offline until tomorrow evening. I'll try and catch up then.

*kiss*

If I were in Redmond, Washington, someone would be dead now...

A continuation of the prior post, and a bit of background information.

About two years ago, I assured my position in Tech Hell by agreeing to 'do what I could' to beef up the computer that her father'd been using. Since hardware tinkering and such is something that I (generally) enjoy, I agreed. As a result, both of the computers that he had went into the trunk of the car and went home with us; the intent was to canibalize the second machine to ramp up the first one. Not an unreasonable goal, really. Upon getting the machines home, I discovered that one of them was a Pentium 100 on a proprietary Packard Bell mainboard. At the time, I shrugged it off, set it aside, and cracked open the other machine.

It turned out to be a Pentium 75. One of the ones where 2+2=5... for moderately large quantities of 2. Or something. In desperation, I ransacked my spare bits and came up with a combo that would smoke both of them... a Cyrix M-II 300 on a FIC VA-503+. It's a solid board, a solid chip, and was three times faster than what he had. By the time the project was assembled, I'd also needed to pillage a soundcard, network adapter, and video card. Lacking a spare modem, the 14.4kb/s unit from the P75 went into it. It was delivered, set up, and running when we left, the next visit.

The new machine was met with grumbles; it didn't matter that the machine itself was virtually a rocket compared to what I'd taken home... 'the internet' was slow. I explained no less than three times that the internet response times depended on the modem, and if they wanted to pony up the bucks I'd happily install it. That got more grumbles; grumbles that turned into desperate begging three months later when the God-only-knows-how-old modem had a cardiac. It seemed that the good Doctor had discovered instant messaging, and was horrified to not be able to talk to his old Marine buddies.

I feel that pain. I've been there. It sucks rocks.

In the three days that elapsed before our next trip up, the Windows 98 install had been thoroughly trashed by someone flogging it in an effort to make a fried (and I do mean fried; the controller chip was melted completely off the board) modem somehow magically fix itself and work. It wasn't a huge burden to reinstall the OS, and that'd leave it with a clean install of the modem that'd been bought.... except he didn't want 98 or 98SE. He wanted Windows ME. Otherwise known as Windows 'Migraine Edition'. I spent three hours trying to explain just how bad ME was... but in the end, that's what he demanded. And that's what he got. There's been a steady flow of crashes and driver issues, and the machine got twitchier and twitchier. About a week ago, while Megan was talking to her folks on the phone, a plea was made for me to come 'do something' with the machine, somehow make it work. I resigned myself to having to spend another three hours trying to unknot ME again; my fanfold of OS cd's went into the suitcase and came up with me.

I sat down in front of this machine at roughly quarter past eight this morning. By noon, I'd come to the realization that the only thing I could do for the ME install was arrange a good burial. A relatively painless chat with the good Doctor ensued, and I settled in to wipe it out and start new. My intent had been to install Windows 98SE... and it's -not- in my fanfold where it belongs (and that's 95% likely to be my own fault, too), so I flipped through to see what else I had. Hrm. Three versions of Windows 95. Um... lemme think abou NO. Windows 98 OEM. Um... no. Windows XP Pro. *snicker* On a 300mhz machine, with only 128mb of RAM? Yeah, right. That narrowed the field down considerably: Windows ME, Windows NT 4 Workstation, and Windows NT 4 Server. There was no way in hell I was going to put ME back on this, and he's got no need for -anything- 'Server'... so Workstation got it. I fought with the ME install long enough to get some drivers downloaded, then slagged it and installed NT. I had the CD for Service Pack 4, and figured it'd be a fairly simple matter to step up to Service Pack 6a. Tweak a few drivers, bolt the cover on, and it's done.

This is where folks start snickering; just do it behind my back. I see it, I'm swinging. Anyway, NT installed flawlessly. SP4 installed flawlessly. I fired up Internet Explorer and aimed it at Micro$oft's website... and discovered that SP4 doesn't do diddlyspit for IE. Version 2.0, baby. *gagging noises* Okay. SP6 updates IE... not a problem, I'll just have to do things in a different order. I should've been simple. I forgot, however, that Billyboy and his merry band of demons were 'phasing out' the 'outdated versions'... in essence, trying to force folks with older machines into the upgrade race so that he could sell 'em a NEW version of Windows at greatly inflated price. It took me an hour to find a site that still had a copy of SP6a. Thirty four megs. On a 44kb/s connection. Ow. It's about half done, now. I'm going to be here a while, yet, I'm afraid. My attempt to download SimpleMU got me nowhere; the winsock files are so far out of date it won't load. *sigh* I'm going to try and snag ICQ Lite so I've at least got something to do.

*sighs and pads off*