Exploring my inner geek

I have owned a computer since 1988, when I got an Amiga 1000 to use as a word processor and a game machine. There was no Internet then; I guess I probably spent less time on the computer then.

After the car wreck in ’98, I was in hospitals and an Adult Foster Home for about nine months; when the insurance ran out, this place had fortunately became open, and I moved in here with my second Amiga, an Amiga 3000 – a powerful machine for it’s day.

Cost me a thousand dollars in the early 90’s…But I did wear out two printers with it, so I guess I got some use out of it. As a matter of fact, that Amiga 3000 still works fine; it just comes from a day when the Internet was not even imagined. To get online, after I moved here, I got an inexpensive HP computer, with a Windows 98SE operating system. Amiga was the first computer to use a Graphic User Interface, which we call "Windows" on Microsoft operating systems, so 98SE wasn’t too hard to figure out.

I got about six years of use out of that machine, before it stopped working right, and I got this one, By the time I got rid of the 98SE machine, I was two operating systems behind; Millennium and XP had come out. I finally got an XP machine in 2006; I’ve been using it ever since.  Now I’m two operating systems behind again.

It uses an AMD Sempron processor, over clocked and running at 2 Ghz. I got the computer at Fry’s – geek heaven . It was cheap; one of their own collections of parts. It came with 256Mg of memory – barely enough for XP to really perform, and that was my first upgrade: more memory. Remember when memory was expensive? Over the years I bought bigger memory modules and now have two 1Gb modules in the machine. 4 gigs is it for XP; that 8 gig parts kit uses Windows 7, which I hear good things about.  I wanna build my own computer.

I went to Fry’s tonight, as a matter of fact, for my next upgrade. I have filled the memory slots, put a sound card in the machine, and a 512Mg video card. I’ve added four USB slots – pretty much filled the PCI slots on the computer’s motherboard. Tonight’s expedition was to get something I’ve been thinking about for awhile – a solid state drive to replace my "C" drive with. The computer would boot up lightning fast, and an SSD has no moving parts – no heat build up. The computer as a whole will run quieter, faster, and cooler.

Win win win, eh?

I was going to yard out the "D" drive, a 3.5 inch internal hard drive – big – and move the "C" drive to the "D" drive slot, after cloning the C drive (I have Seagate tools; Seagate makes good hard drive tools) so I bought an external case for the D drive – convert it to a USB drive.

The SSD is a 2.5 inch drive – I bought spacers for it.

But, it turns out that I cannot use any of what I bought tonight. The SSD is a SATA drive; I’m currently set up for PATA /IDE drives and don’t have the right cables, even though my motherboard has SATA connectors. Either I have to get a cable – Wise Geek online says I can use both PATA and SATA drives together at the same time, if the motherboard supports it, or I need to get my money back, so I guess I need to drive back down to Wilsonville and go to Fry’s again.

It also turns out that the D drive I’m currently using is not a SATA drive, and the external enclosure I got is for a SATA drive – I can’t use it for the foreseeable future, so that just gets taken back, or exchanged for "the right one", cuz I kinda want to keep that D drive – it works.

Guess it depends on whether I can find the right cables.

My inner geek is not so bright at times.

SATA? PATA? Molex? Huh?

Well, I did pull the computer out of it’s cabinet and I did blow some dust out of it, and now the hard drives are screwed in tightly (they are quieter) and I did finally straighten out he tangle of cords behind the computer, so it wasn’t a total waste….

But it kinda was, nonetheless.

Obviously, since I’m writing this using my ol’ XP machine, I didn’t fuck up too badly; the computer works.

Never a bad idea to blow the dust out of it.

 

*****