Installation

I've got two days off work, leading up to the Bank Holiday Monday - 5 days off to get on and do my college work... only 1) My PC at home keeps dying (a couple of years ago I nabbed some extra RAM, which is running at a different parity from the other DIMMS [yes, good ole DIMMS] and whenever the system crosses this parity it goes oopsy). 2) My new PC arrived yesterday, ready for install.

What could be easier than ghosting the original Hard drive onto the new one to save reinstalls and losing precious settings? Would you like a list?

Perhaps not. It should have been easy, but after battling with dead floppy drives, inability to download service pack 2 because my modem doesn't work, and unable to install my modem because I don't have service pack 2... I find myself trying to get it up and running at work - yay!

Anyone would think I don't know anything about computers. Service Pack 2 won't install without killing the PC dead. Service Pack 1a won't install and allow anything else to work... and now it won't uninstall. I can't rejig any services because the MMC won't run, and IE 7 wouldn't allow Auto Updates, so, having uninstalled that, I can't get on the Internet.

It takes me back to my very first personal PC install (I've never bought out of the box PCs). First things first I installed the CPU on the Motherboard, screwed the Motherboard to the backplane, fitted that into the PC Case, and plugged in the power connections from the PSU - easy peasy - except that with the Monitor connected to the graphics card and the harddrive connected via the IDE cable, nothing worked!

I phoned up the company to ask for assistance, and they took me through it. Turns out that I hadn't used any of the plastic spacers between the motherboard and the metal backplane - the spacers would have prevented the motherboard from making connection to every point at once, thus shorting it out.

I managed to convince the guy I had used them ("Damn, damn, damn!") But, whilst we were on the phone he suggested that I just pull out the psu connector to the power button on the front of the PC Case... This I did, whilst the PC was still plugged into the mains, the rear power button switched to on, and the PC raring to go. Needless to say that when I disconnected those cables the world exploded.

"What was that?" Asked the guy.
"Nothing," I replied, checking my eyebrows for baldness.
"Did you have it unplugged from the mains when you removed those cables."
"Sure. It was the backdoor. Nothing to worry about. Look I've got to go, I think the cat needs milking, or something."

Despite almost killing myself, scoring a line across the motherboard and completely failing to install my first pc without a hiccup, I convinced the company to let me get a replacement motherboard.

That was a breeze compared to this, where I now discover the registry has corrupted itself - I swear I had nothing to do with it!