Week of October 8, 2001
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Thursday Friday
Saturday Sunday
Most Recent Update
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I am back up and posting again. Building the new computer was fun but frustrating. Frustrating mainly because my video card is not working properly which I think is due to the fact that the driver CD for the motherboard and therefore the AGP port did not come with the motherboard/processor combo. This was a mistake by MWave I am sure when they put together the processor and motherboard and cooling fan for the processor someone removed the CD and failed to put it back in the box. I called their customer service number first thing Monday morning and they promised to send it by priority mail.
By Thursday when I had not received it I e-mailed them and they sent back an e-mail apologizing that whomever I had talked to on Monday morning had failed to send the CD. If I have not received the CD by Monday I intend to send a stronger worded e-mail as I am unable to run my monitor at any more than 16 colors and 800x600 resolution. All the documentation for the video card says this is because the incorrect drivers are being used for the AGP. In this case no drivers are being used yet. Of course now I am downloading the appropriate drivers from the Gigabyte website but that takes a lot of time over a dial-up connection like I have. At least I should get the CD as a backup if I need to reinstall the drivers in the future.
I am very pleased with the Antec KS-282 case and 300W power supply. Installing the components in the case was a breeze and all the screw holes lined up perfectly. As well, the extra cooling fan for the case went in without any problem. I join the rest of the Daynotes Gang in recommending the Antec cases very highly. There are just no sharp edges in the case as there were in the other two cases I worked with this week.
The other two cases being the other two computers I worked with. One of them was the Packard Bell that the kids had been using. It had a relatively new CD-ROM drive which I tried to use in this system but it stopped working before I got all the programs installed so I had to purchase a new CD-ROM drive. I had hoped to buy a CD burner in a couple of months or so and use the older drive until that time but that plan did not pan out. Taking the CD drive and the hard drive out of it caused me some cuts on my fingers from the sharp edges in the case. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the hard drive in that computer was a Maxtor and it copied over to the new drive for the kids computer very nicely. Alas, the old hard drive I had been using, a Quantum, died during the transfers but I was able to get the data off it I needed before it bought the farm.
I used Power Quest's DriveCopy 4.0 to copy the files from the old Maxtor drive to the new 20 GB Maxtor drive for the kids computer. It worked perfectly and the computer booted afterward from the new drive without any problem. I was unable to get it to work with my new motherboard however, the EX Boot utility somehow would not allow DriveCopy to boot from the virtual floppy it tried to create. I did not have enough patience to work with it to see if I could get it two work, I simply copied the essential files between the old Quantum drive and the new 60 GB Matrox drive, luckily before the Quantum drive died. I then installed both Windows 98SE and Windows 2000 Professional so I have a system that will dual boot. One day I will install my copy of Redmond Linux and have a triple booting system, I hope. So now I have a much faster system with the 1.4 GHz Athlon processor and 512MB PC133 RAM and the 7200 rpm Maxtor 60GB hard drive. Windows 2000 is behaving nicely although I have had some frustrations with it which I will tell you about later. Right now I need to go get showered again after running as I am taking Delanae and Stacey out tonight.
Still having display problems. As you may recall from last night's update, I am unable to run my display at more than 800x600 with 16 colors. I downloaded and installed the AGP driver last night but that did not fix my problem. I also downloaded the Creative SoundBlaster driver for the embedded sound and that works great now. I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling both the video card and monitor without any success. I have searched the Web for any more answers to this problem and have been unable to find any. Finally, I am e-mailing the other Daynoters for help with this technical problem. I will let you know what they come up with.
The Hogs won yesterday! In case you missed it, the Arkansas Razorbacks beat South Carolina 10-7 yesterday afternoon on national television. South Carolina came into the game undefeated and ranked 9th in the country. Arkansas is now 3-3 and has a bye week to prepare for the rest of the season. This was a very important win as it may allow them to salvage their season and make it to a bowl game. That would be a real accomplishment for a team as young as they are playing in the SouthEastern Conference. Basketball practice has also started so for a while here I will have both Arkansas basketball and football to report on. I only hope as many basketball games are televised here as there have been football games. I have only missed seeing one football game and that was a breather against Weber State.
My date last night went well. Delanae, Stacey, and I had dinner at a local restaurant known as Cibao's. Delanae and I split two entrees, wood roasted salmon and garlic chicken over penne. Both were excellent and left us too full for dessert. Stacey had spaghetti with meatballs which she finished tonight after church. She pronounced it very good both last night and tonight.
Tomorrow starts a regular week again for the first time in two weeks. I will only have my regular Wednesday "off" so I have to get back into the groove again. I have a meeting at 7 AM tomorrow and we will be using an updated version of our electronic medical record software for the first time tomorrow. Should be an interesting day.
