Tuesday, May 03, 2005
Tick...... Tick...... Tick......
went the hard disk drive in my home PC. Shortly thereafter the desk top disappeared to be replaced by a blue screen of death (XP style). A reboot hung with the Windows XP splash screen displayed.
In spite of the fact that I had just lost four years of accumulated detritus, I was actually quite relaxed about the situation. I had no back ups but all I had really lost of importance was about 200 hours of game play with such titles as Rome: Total War and Call of Duty and Far Cry.
Monday afternoon was spent buying a new 160 Gb hard disk and rebuilding my PC. The first problem was that the "Advent Recovery CD", which doesn't recover your PC but merely resets it to pristine factory condition, failed to do anything. Instead I decided to go for a clean install of Windows XP. This presented three further problems in that a) my copy was a Pro upgrade and couldn't be installed on a bare disk, b) there were no graphics drivers for my video card on it, c) there were no drivers for the sound card.
I solved problem a with a very old Windows 98 install disk. Once the XP disk was convinced I had one, it all went smoothly though I had to find the graphics and sound driver on the Internet.
There's something vaguely satisfying about a new Windows installation. The "Add/Remove" dialogue box only had one item in it: "service pack 2". The whole system runs much faster than in olden days too.
Unfortunately, I am now in the process of loading lots of the old rubbish back on.
In spite of the fact that I had just lost four years of accumulated detritus, I was actually quite relaxed about the situation. I had no back ups but all I had really lost of importance was about 200 hours of game play with such titles as Rome: Total War and Call of Duty and Far Cry.
Monday afternoon was spent buying a new 160 Gb hard disk and rebuilding my PC. The first problem was that the "Advent Recovery CD", which doesn't recover your PC but merely resets it to pristine factory condition, failed to do anything. Instead I decided to go for a clean install of Windows XP. This presented three further problems in that a) my copy was a Pro upgrade and couldn't be installed on a bare disk, b) there were no graphics drivers for my video card on it, c) there were no drivers for the sound card.
I solved problem a with a very old Windows 98 install disk. Once the XP disk was convinced I had one, it all went smoothly though I had to find the graphics and sound driver on the Internet.
There's something vaguely satisfying about a new Windows installation. The "Add/Remove" dialogue box only had one item in it: "service pack 2". The whole system runs much faster than in olden days too.
Unfortunately, I am now in the process of loading lots of the old rubbish back on.
# posted by JeremyP : 5:29 pm
