A Busman's Holiday
Have you ever heard the British expression, “busman's holiday?” It means spending your vacation time doing the same things you do at work.
Saturday Chuck and I drove down to Andrew's to celebrate his birthday a week early and to deliver his presents, a new hard drive and a new video card, the e-GeForce 8800 GT. Alas the week before Andrew's elderly case (purchased in 2000, now on its second motherboard) gave up the ghost (well, the power button refused to fire it up) so we were also bringing a new case (extra large because the 8800 GT is extra large) and a new power supply because the 8800 GT would need it. There's much better shopping for computer parts here in the big city, and the staff at Micro Center seemed very knowledgeable.
So I grabbed all the tools I could find plus a flashlight, the original motherboard disk and manual, Windows XP install disk and some stray cables. We stopped en route at a Radio Shack to buy a wrist strap to guard against static, taking no chances.
The beginning went pretty well. Andrew had already disconnected the two CD/DVD drives and the two hard drives. We removed RAM, left on the processor, and installed the motherboard in the new case. Of course we had to remove it again because we forgot the faceplate for the ports. Then we installed the video card. Then we removed the video card so we could install the ribbon cable for hard drive and CD-ROM drives. Oh no, primary EIDE (PATA) cable won't fit because its slot is directly under the Video card. Chuck volunteered to run to Best Buy to get a SATA hard drive, as only two of those 4 ports were blocked by the video card. Then we installed the video card. Then we removed the video card so we could thread the processor power cable under it to the proper spot on the motherboard.
At this point Andrew remarked that the video card “is a bit of a drama queen.”
Then we went to install the floppy drive, and the video card was blocking that and would have to be removed yet again, so we decided that the floppy drive was not needed.
Eventually we wound up with power and data cables for the CD and the HDD, video and sound cards and memory installed, case fans powered, video card powered, and all the little lights from the front of the case connected. Powered it up and everything worked first time!
Dinner break before the dreaded Windows and drivers installations.