Dark Bilious Vapors

After several months of scrimping and saving and trading favors (in order to collect the necessary components at minimal cost), I've been able to do a computer upgrade this weekend (normal technical challenges are even more challenging when one is forced to do so on the cheap). The upgrade basically involved dropping a new motherboard and low end CPU into the case; any and all components which could be "recycled" were. The task itself wasn't all that difficult, just time consuming. What I found most interesting was the complete reversal of my expectations regarding my operating systems. Based on past experience (when I was a consultant/trainer in St. Louis) I had expected Windows 2000 to adapt to the change in mobo/CPU with a slight hiccup. At my former job, we'd often configure machines by taking a disk image from one machine and then copying that image over to another one. Often, the motherboard/chipset on the target machine didn't match the hardware on which the original image was based, but Windows managed to take a reboot cycle to detect the new chipset, reconfigure to use the appropriate drivers, and then hummed along quite adequately after a reboot. But Saturday night, when I tried to boot up Windows... Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD)! Grabbed the Win2000 CD, tried to repair the installation. Boot up Windows.... BSOD! Go into the installation screen, try installing Windows over the old installation (i.e., reinstall the system files back into the C:\WINNT directory). During the hardware detection process of the setup wizard.... BSOD! (Did that one several times, just to see if that was a temporary glitch--no such luck.) Fortunately, I have good backups, so it wasn't too horrendous to just wipe out the Windows partition and reinstall completely from scratch. Unfortunately, that required hunting down all the CDs for all my software (well, not all... at least not immediately--we installed the necessary stuff most of Sunday, and the rest will get there on an "as required" basis).

On the other hand, I expected that Mandrake Linux would gag and require a complete reinstallation (save for my home directory). Nope. As Mandrake booted up its hardware detection routine gracefully caught the hardware changes, ran the configuration programs to prompt me for the relevant information, made the necessary configuration changes and found the necessary drivers within the Mandrake installation itself, and then gracefully rebooted into a completely functional KDE desktop; no problems whatsoever. A very pleasant surprise....

Len on 06.21.04 @ 07:45 AM CST