Unfortunately, Dystopia is the name of my main Desktop computer, pretty much my only really useable machine. (I've given up mostly using my vintage 1996 Mac, and I have one other less advanced PC that is scheduled to run the CNC Router I will build eventually). Usable was a fairly charitable description for a Single Core Socket 939 Athalon at 2.4 GHz. But it did have one thing going for it, a 2 TB SATA drive, divided into two partitions (thanks to Seagate's cloning program splitting it to match my previous 200 Gig drive). C: of course was the main one, and D: contained all my torrents.

The graphics card, a BFG-made nVidia 7300 lost its fan a while ago, but kept working. But I got into playing a game that ran the graphics pretty hard, and I got an education. The game would oddly lose its frame rate dramatically, then regain it in a minute or so. The Task Manager would show a huge spike in Kernel times. The in-game debug stats showed that it was that the Open GL calls that were taking an order of magnitude longer, and my handy little Infrared thermometer showed me what was happening to the graphics card. At the start of the game it would begin heating up, and at a certain point, it would go into some kind of thermal shutdown.  It still worked, but slowly.  Once it cooled (barely) enough, it would start flying again, and overheat again. Lather, Rinse, Repeat. A strategically placed case fan solved the problem, but before I could implement a better plan, it failed permanently, only working in some kind of VGA mode.

So began the desperate struggle to salvage things as other cascading failures followed. CHKDSK started making an appearance in the boot process, never a good sign. Attempts to copy my documents folder to my external USB drive would fail before it got to the important stuff, all my pictures and writing (and apps, and software installers). Hey Microsoft, what ever happened to Abort, Retry, Ignore? Abandoning a copy fifteen folder levels deep because NTUser.dat is in use is a really shitty way to leave a user. Attempts to copy my data into the remaining space on the D: Partition were similarly cursed, even a Power Outage added itself to the mix. By this point, the machine was starting to randomly fail to get through the POST or load the BIOS.  I fell back to my previous video card, with significant additional problems related to the end of support for it in the current divers. Eventually I decided I didn't want to risk the C: drive any more, and pulled out my previous 200 Gig IDE drive, which SHOULD have still had a working OS on it. But guess what, it wouldn't boot.

Always Mount a Scratch Monkey they say, Well, the Monkey may well be dead, but it's hard to tell because attempting to reformat the old drive and re-install the OS on it failed with a random freeze, and after that, well, it's just not restarting.

(I even replaced the CMOS battery. No real help there though.)

Well, I finally dug out the crowbar to pry open my wallet.  I've always wanted to have a Laptop. Meet Etna. The best HP laptop Office Depot had laying around. It doesn't give me access to my SATA drive yet, but it gets me online, sorta.  All my good stuff is still locked away (Including my bookmarks!). And I wasn't joking about the crowbar. My bank called me the day of the purchase to make sure it was really me.

I have gotten my first taste of Windows 8 and it's every bit as vile as you have heard. Thank goodness for the auto-setup it ran when I first powered up because I wouldn't have found some of the network settings manually. Although it was quite annoying in insisting to use my wireless access point instead of the perfectly good network cable plugged into the side. Eventually I had to turn the wireless off entirely. And I'm still not too thrilled about the info it insisted on collecting for a "Microsoft Account".  No, I'm not going to your stinking App store. They seem to have added another layer of abstraction to the filesystem too, in order to hide what's under the hood from users. My files seem to save in a directory called "Library" which is not what one would normally call something you write to.

Hopefully this weekend a trip to Fry's will give me the chance to get all the parts for a killer system, one that I will run into the ground for another ten years. And run my copy of XP Pro on for as long as I can.

Posted by: Mauser at 02:39 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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