Repairing a PC using a box of spares

05-06-2006

Well I found myself fixing yet another PC Friday night and Saturday morning. This PC was left in such a bad state after its owner tried removing malware that it required rebuilding. I found the HD painfully slow and noisy and the machine refused to boot from CDROM. I opened it up and discovered that the CD drive was SCSI and was not being recognised at boot-up. Plus there were two HDs in there both on the primary IDE cable!

To cut a long story short I ended up replacing the second HD with one double the size from my box of spares (blue box in the pic) and adding another IDE cable and making the second HD master on the secondary IDE. I also temporarily added a DVD drive so I could reinstall the OS after reformatting the HDs by booting from CD. I then spent a few hours with the PC connected to my ADSL in order to install the necessary security software. I also switched a few things like Trillian instead of MSN and Firefox instead of IE. That should reduce the risk of further infection.

When it was done and handed back to its owner I decided that that was the last one. I’m tired of building and fixing PC’s. I’ve been doing it for a very long time now and its just so tedious. Besides, most of the people I know have laptops these days. While I’ve done the odd laptop repair they tend not to go wrong as much and if they do, their owners take them to a shop to get them fixed.

So hopefully that’s the last PC I’ll be fixing. Well.. I am thinking of putting together a computer room upstairs in my study-come-storage room but those PC’s I’ll be putting together for me and that’s different.

...

On Saturday night I decided to have a go at Tomb Raider Legend. Its been sat on my front room floor for a very long time. I'd played it for 5 minutes and got distracted and never really went back to it. I don’t know why but I fancied just chilling out with a console game for a bit so I started playing with it and testing the controls. They are definitely much better than those of Angel of Darkness.

On Sunday after lunch I continued playing with Richard watching for a bit and making a few suggestions. I finally got the hang of the controls and found myself immersed in the game. In fact Richard, Emma had to drag me off the thing after I told her we’d go out after I reached the next checkpoint (about the 5th time).

Its now Sunday night and Emma has updated her 'B and B' page and I’ve sorted out the comic and all I have to do is write this blog and upload it before I reward myself with just a little more time with Lara. Seriously dudes, it’s the best Tomb Raider yet.