Dissembled at Home

For reasons that will be explained in another blog, soon, we decided to buy a personal home computer. After much debate and due consideration, we decided against a laptop (too expensive) and against a branded desktop (too expensive) and decided to buy an assembled computer. Then - we’re not quite sure, looking back, how it happened, but we can at least partially put the blame on our dear friend S - we decided to buy the parts and assemble the computer ourselves, at home.

Technophobes, read no further. You have been warned!

Now, when I say we decided to assemble it “ourselves”, I mean, of course, Amit and S decided to assemble it – for me, assembling a computer is purely a spectator sport.

The trouble started even before we got all the bits and pieces together. Selecting how many of what type of which had been left to me. Since I am largely illiterate in the matter of computer hardware specifications, this was a risky opening gambit in any case, but in this particular case, it was made riskier by the retailer saying that the configuration I wanted was no longer in the market and suggesting an alternative. I told him to hang on for a day while I chewed over it; but an hour spent browsing the Net the next day did nothing to bring any clarity on the matter – it only confused me thoroughly. The configuration I had chosen at first, was simply (as I understood it) the fastest and the best. The new suggestion, however, was confusing because it was better in some features and not as good in others, and I had no idea which features were more important.

So, I decided to go with the retailer’s recommendation. He ought to know, right?

Wrong.

On Friday night, about 9 p.m., the components were home delivered. S and A were ready and waiting, and so was dinner. “Shall we eat, first,” asked I, optimistically.

“It’ll only take half an hour,” they assured me. “Or an hour, tops. And that’s only because we’re a bit rusty – the professionals do it in ten minutes flat, you know.”

Maybe, but I knew that “a bit rusty” meant it was 15 years since either of them had last done any such thing… and a LOT changes in 15 years.

In any event, it was three hours, one cut thumb and lots of heated debate later, before they declared it done. The computer was “assembled” by then, all except the RAM, which we had not been able to get from this retailer and would have to get from some other shop the next day. Amit was still optimistic that the system would be able to “come up” without RAM, so he powered it on. The first thing that happened was a dreadful clicking, jarring sound, which sounded like some serious sparking. Luckily, it was only a power cable getting in the way of the fan. Once that was fixed, all appeared to be fine. They powered it on and nothing happened. “Oh, that’s because there’s no RAM,” said they knowledgeably and came, at long last, to the dinner table (which, as it happened, was covered with spare parts that had to be cleared up before dinner could be served).

Thankfully, the next day was Saturday. RAM was home-delivered around noon, and inserted into the machine about two minutes later. On it went and immediately emitted a series of loud and very aggrieved beeping noises, before shutting itself down resolutely. Amit tried another couple of times, without any perceivable change in response, then called S, who came straight over.

From then straight till 10 p.m., A worked at it, with sometimes in-person and the rest of the time, telephonic support from S. The afternoon was spent lugging the blasted machine all the way to the RAM supplier’s shop – he replaced the RAM and the beeping sound stopped. He also cleared up another mystery – after the first few (failed) start-ups, S and A had taken off the chip cooler fan (a diagnostic attempt) and found to their horror, a strange, grey, gluey discharge on the back of the chip. They decided it must have been some sort of sticker on the chip, which had melted, and they carefully and diligently wiped it off, leaving both the chip and the chip cooler sparkling clean. That, the RAM supplier informed A, was not quite the right thing to do. The grey goo was, in fact, a cooling paste of some kind, which was very much required to be there. “How was I to know? It looked like something bad, so we thought it best to clean it off.”

A hundred bucks and five minutes later, a fresh dose of the gooey cooling paste had been applied and the machine was closed up and returned up.

By late Saturday afternoon, you could say significant progress had been made: with the RAM functional, the system was coming up (without complaint) enough to allow the installation of the OS. However, my OS of choice was Windows XP, and therein lay a problem. Apparently, my choice of motherboard and processor were so extremely high-tech and forward looking, that the only way Windows XP could be installed on the system was by first installing various drivers, which could only be done by means of a floppy drive! CD wouldn’t work. A pen drive with a floppy drive created within it? Nope, it wouldn’t work. Praying to Bill Gates??? Nope, that didn’t work either.

The funny thing is, the ruddy motherboard does not even have the provision to allow an internal floppy drive to be plugged in to it – floppy drives are that archaic.

S and A, sitting 2 km away from each other, were burning up the internet and the telephone lines, doing independent/combined research on the internet to find a workaround.

“Disable SATA”

“Disable RAID”

“Control I”

“F6 installation”

“IDE”

“PATA”

“IHCE”

“Legacy”

“Native”

“BIOS”

“F2”

“$*(%($^&”

How can anyone generate a remotely passable Archaeology assignment, I ask you, while being subjected to this kind of diatribe?

Sunday dawned. S and A had reached a conclusion – the thing couldn’t be done. We either had to buy a floppy drive – in which case, the chances of success were unclear; or we had to discard the Windows XP altogether, and buy (no upgrades allowed!) Windows Vista, in which case, the chances of success were still unclear, but a bit less so. The floppy drive was the cheaper of the two options, so I was dispatched to go and obtain one. Being a Sunday, it was an exercise in futility – the one shop that was open, was – no surprise here – all out of floppy drives.

Sunday passed in the downloading of Linux – S and A thought that might be easier to install, so what if it was no the OS I wanted. By the end of the day, one Linux disc was ready. Amit turned on the machine, inserted the Linux disc, and… bang! No go!!

Dinner passed in a haze of options. Buy a floppy drive? Buy Vista? Or, wait, how about this – buy a PATA disc, unplug the SATA disc, install Windows XP on the PATA disc – that should work, right? Thankfully, by then it was too late and even the one shop that had been open would have closed, so we could not put this new option to the test.

And that’s where the matter rests. No SATA, no PATA, no RAID, no floppy drive, no Vista, no XP… and, after about four-and-twenty man hours (times two!) of effort, no prospect of a functional computer. Not all stories have a happy ending.

Morals of the story:

• Do it yourself? Not on your life!
• There’s a reason that branded goods are expensive.
• When men say half an hour, it usually means three days.

PS: For the serious technofreak, it is an Intel DG33TL motherboard, with an Intel E6750 processor, and 2 GB, 800 MHz RAM of unknown parentage. Advice welcome.