A Case of the Duh's

And I call myself a computer guy. First I installed a hard drive that my BIOS can't handle, eventually causing the drive to fail. (The worst thing about that is that I tried to run Spinrite on the drive a number of months ago, long before it failed, and Spinrite told me that the drive size was different than what the BIOS thought it was. I remember thinking at that time that if Windows could see the correct size, this didn't matter. Duh #1.)

Then I bought a new card for the computer so that it would be able to recognize the larger drive, and installing it killed the machine. (Duh #2.) The card is also not returnable, so if I can't use it, it's $30 down the toilet. So Gail and I decided to buy a new computer so we could install the disk in that one. We found a brand new PC at Tiger Direct — Intel Celeron Dual Core 1.6 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 320 GB disk, DVDRW, keyboard, mouse, various memory card readers, on sale for $299. So we bought it last weekend, and I've spent the last few days setting it up — installing the wireless card from the other machine, reinstalling applications and drivers, setting up email and user accounts, and so on.

I must mention CopyTrans once again — when I paved and rebuilt my system back in the spring, I used CopyTrans to recreate my iTunes library from my iPod and it worked flawlessly. This past weekend, I used it again to do the same thing and once again, it worked flawlessly. This time, with the faster USB 2.0 ports on the new machine, the whole thing took maybe two hours. More snaps for CopyTrans. <snap> <snap> <snap>

The new machine came preloaded with Windows Vista Home Premium. I've used Vista a few times at work, but I never really played with anything other than what I needed to do my job, so there's lots that I had never seen.. It looks nice, has performed very well so far, and has some very nice features, like parental controls for user accounts and the ability to resize a disk partition without formatting the disk, or even shutting down the computer. I'll write more about Vista in a few weeks after I've been able to play with it a little more.

Anyway, last night I decided to install the old system disk into the new machine and copy the data off of that. There isn't that much data on it, but we did store some stuff on it after the bigger disk died. I took the cover off the machine and looked for the empty disk bay. That's when I realized Duh #3.

The new computer does not support the old EIDE disks. There isn't even a power adapter that fits the disk. So now we have these two old disks that cannot be installed in the new computer and I have to buy an external disk enclosure and access the disks via USB. I already bought an external enclosure when the disk died, hoping that I could access it that way, but I couldn't. When we decided to buy a new computer, I figured I wouldn't need the enclosure so (Duh #4) I returned it. Now I have to go and buy it again. Sigh.

Hopefully we're done with the Duh's... for now at least.