Oh wahta suck-ass morning!

Actually, it’s just sucky because it’s morning.

After fighting with Renee’s system all day Monday, I broke down yesterday and bought her an nforce board, myself a KT400 board, 512M for each of us, 2 AMD XP2000+ CPUs, and 2 300W power supplies.

After Ray went to bed, the adventure began. First, rip

First, tear down Renee’s box, pull her crapped out mobo. Install her new stuff, check BIOS, boot 98. Watch 98 detect everything left and right. Life is good, so far.

When the CD is working again, get the NVidia driver CD and start that process. First sign of trouble – the audio drivers don’t want to install. Get the video updated, get all the drivers installed, and reboot. LAN and Audio have the little “!” marks. This is about 9:30pm. I still have hope. What begins now is the usual windows Change BIOS->Boot->check for function->upgrade driver->reboot cycle. Somewhere in there I managed to get the IDE controller into Legacy Mode. I end up slapping a spare network card into it and running windows update in the hopes that that will help.

Meanwhile, gotta do something about my machine. Crack open my case,remove the System tray, pull the P3 mobo, install the Athlon. Start to re-assemble…..

…discover that the new mobo is *JUST* that much too big, and that the drive cage won’t clear the power connector. i.e. The motherboard is too big. Fuck. Shut down darkcanvas.com, and swap cases.

By now it’s close to midnight, I have three machines open and parts spread out all over the computer room. I’ve already misplaced the screwdriver so many times I’ve lost it. Get spare from garage. reassemble darkcanvas.com, put it back, make sure it’s running.

Finally get my box assembled, and boot up. Need to install athlon kernel, but that can wait a few. Find out onboard lan not supported. Slap in spare network card. Most everything else was detected OK by kudzu. get System up and running. Realize that somwhere the LAN cards for mine and her boxes got swapped. Got to fix the DHCP records to make sure we get the right IPs…

…can’t get outside house with my box. Bleck. Get her box working, install it, crawl into bed. 2:30am.

Wake up in morning. get ready for work. While waiting for ray to get up, and coffee to brew, find and fix her IDE problem. Find notes that 98SE is required for the NForce LAN & Audio. Remember clickbox on router to enable my machine to get to outside network.

Find coffee spilling out coffeemaker. I forgot to make sure the pot was in place. Clean mess, feed ray, make new pot of coffee. Leave for work….bust ass on ice in front of house. Loose screw for sunglasses. Go back into house, get glasses repair kit and fix sunglasses. Walk *CAREFULLY* to truck, drive into work. Get here half-hour late. Argh.