Well, I'm of mixed feelings right now. I received my latest round of replacement hardware from Newegg on Monday but didn't install them until tonight, partly due to being busy, but mostly due to being really nervous that it still wouldn't work and I'd have to go through the whole rigamarole AGAIN. And that would really, really have sucked.
Fortunately, no such thing happened. I gutted it, stuck the new hardware in along with everything that was sticking around, carted it back into my apartment, plugged everything in, and bam. It started up. Well...for about five seconds, then it died again. This happened a few more times, then I moved the CPU fan connector cable away from the fan itself and everything booted fine. And by everything, I mean the hardware.
Which brings me to my mixed feelings. See, the computer is working fine and I won't have to waste any more time shipping. But, um....it won't boot Windows anymore. Which is kind of a huge problem. It is, luckily, one I anticipated, and I laid to hand a copy of Vista Ultimate. It's not that I *want* to go Vista yet, it's just that if I had to reinstall Windows it might as well be the latest kind. Should cut down on the number of times I need to install Windows at least by one. But first I tried a repair installation of XP....only it couldn't find my XP install. *sighs* Fiddled with recovery console, but no.
So Vista. Only Vista, sure enough, can't find my XP install either, and better yet, wants to fully reformat any drive I install it on. YAY, hundreds of gigabytes of completely unnecessary data loss FTW. What could possibly be better?
Edit: So I just spent the last, like, seven hours downloading Knoppix, a version of Linux that can be run entirely off CD, full of recovery tools. And trying, without a great deal of success, to repartition my NTFS hard drive so that I could install Vista without wiping everything out. (Knoppix tools don't much like working with NTFS, and finalizing partition changes required the Windows chkdsk program, which I didn't have access to 'cause I couldn't get access to Windows. *mutters*). And dealing with other issues besides. I finally took out my old DVD-RW drive because not only was it only opening half-way unless manually pulled the rest of the way, but it had actually formed a ring of scratches around the Knoppix CD that was severely degrading its ability to function. Yick.
Anyway. So I mess with all that, reposition my working DVD-RW DL drive, all sorts of good stuff. Finally I have the bright idea of swapping in the XP boot CD and using chkdsk from the recovery console. Only I don't need to, because suddenly Windows boots into chkdsk. And then after another reboot or two, suddenly XP boots normally. What the hell?
*headdesks*
So, on the one hand, good news....but on the other, what a waste of several hours...
Edit (5/27/07): So Windows will only boot if I have a bootable CD in the drive and don't boot to the CD. The hell?
It also transpired that my 300GB hard drive was suddenly registering as unformatted. After a bit of panicking, though, I confirmed that it had just somehow lost its partition table. And a bit more fiddling with Knoppix and the wondrous gpart and testdisk commands got the table back intact and everything's fine again. I also had to do the same thing when an attempt to get Windows to boot normally by running fixmbr and fixboot from the Windows Recovery Console failed to achieve this goal, but did manage to destroy my 400GB drive's partition table. Yay for Microsoft.
Edit (5/29/07): Drama pretty much over. Turns out I'd missed a fairly key setting in my BIOS that specified which hard drive to try to boot off first. It had picked my non-system drive for some reason or other. I'm still not sure why the CD changed things, but with the proper boot order restored everything seems pretty much hunky-dory. Of course, chkdsk and fixboot and so on are still whining about irredeemable file structure faults and the like, but as there really haven't been any signs of any such thing being the case, I'm going to assume it's some sort of religious objection to my having led my hard drives into sin by operating on them from inside Linux.
Also, apparently I can run 16X antialiasing now. Holy shit. Makes Broken Sword 3 look really quite awesomely good. (The characters are still low-poly for my tastes, but no video card enhancement's going to fix that.) Although by "I can run 16x anti-aliasing", I mean I can do it with SLI and thereby lose all performance benefits from SLI and no way in hell is it going to work on the really modern stuff. But hey, if you've ever hankered to play, say, System Shock 2 in seriously high grade anti-aliasing, SLI is your graphics technology.
Fortunately, no such thing happened. I gutted it, stuck the new hardware in along with everything that was sticking around, carted it back into my apartment, plugged everything in, and bam. It started up. Well...for about five seconds, then it died again. This happened a few more times, then I moved the CPU fan connector cable away from the fan itself and everything booted fine. And by everything, I mean the hardware.
Which brings me to my mixed feelings. See, the computer is working fine and I won't have to waste any more time shipping. But, um....it won't boot Windows anymore. Which is kind of a huge problem. It is, luckily, one I anticipated, and I laid to hand a copy of Vista Ultimate. It's not that I *want* to go Vista yet, it's just that if I had to reinstall Windows it might as well be the latest kind. Should cut down on the number of times I need to install Windows at least by one. But first I tried a repair installation of XP....only it couldn't find my XP install. *sighs* Fiddled with recovery console, but no.
So Vista. Only Vista, sure enough, can't find my XP install either, and better yet, wants to fully reformat any drive I install it on. YAY, hundreds of gigabytes of completely unnecessary data loss FTW. What could possibly be better?
Edit: So I just spent the last, like, seven hours downloading Knoppix, a version of Linux that can be run entirely off CD, full of recovery tools. And trying, without a great deal of success, to repartition my NTFS hard drive so that I could install Vista without wiping everything out. (Knoppix tools don't much like working with NTFS, and finalizing partition changes required the Windows chkdsk program, which I didn't have access to 'cause I couldn't get access to Windows. *mutters*). And dealing with other issues besides. I finally took out my old DVD-RW drive because not only was it only opening half-way unless manually pulled the rest of the way, but it had actually formed a ring of scratches around the Knoppix CD that was severely degrading its ability to function. Yick.
Anyway. So I mess with all that, reposition my working DVD-RW DL drive, all sorts of good stuff. Finally I have the bright idea of swapping in the XP boot CD and using chkdsk from the recovery console. Only I don't need to, because suddenly Windows boots into chkdsk. And then after another reboot or two, suddenly XP boots normally. What the hell?
*headdesks*
So, on the one hand, good news....but on the other, what a waste of several hours...
Edit (5/27/07): So Windows will only boot if I have a bootable CD in the drive and don't boot to the CD. The hell?
It also transpired that my 300GB hard drive was suddenly registering as unformatted. After a bit of panicking, though, I confirmed that it had just somehow lost its partition table. And a bit more fiddling with Knoppix and the wondrous gpart and testdisk commands got the table back intact and everything's fine again. I also had to do the same thing when an attempt to get Windows to boot normally by running fixmbr and fixboot from the Windows Recovery Console failed to achieve this goal, but did manage to destroy my 400GB drive's partition table. Yay for Microsoft.
Edit (5/29/07): Drama pretty much over. Turns out I'd missed a fairly key setting in my BIOS that specified which hard drive to try to boot off first. It had picked my non-system drive for some reason or other. I'm still not sure why the CD changed things, but with the proper boot order restored everything seems pretty much hunky-dory. Of course, chkdsk and fixboot and so on are still whining about irredeemable file structure faults and the like, but as there really haven't been any signs of any such thing being the case, I'm going to assume it's some sort of religious objection to my having led my hard drives into sin by operating on them from inside Linux.
Also, apparently I can run 16X antialiasing now. Holy shit. Makes Broken Sword 3 look really quite awesomely good. (The characters are still low-poly for my tastes, but no video card enhancement's going to fix that.) Although by "I can run 16x anti-aliasing", I mean I can do it with SLI and thereby lose all performance benefits from SLI and no way in hell is it going to work on the really modern stuff. But hey, if you've ever hankered to play, say, System Shock 2 in seriously high grade anti-aliasing, SLI is your graphics technology.
I guess I'm not entirely sure what advantages this has over the (wholly illegal) BitTorrent route.
It's simply a large catalogue of items that you can stream instantly. I don't know if any advantages exist per say, but it is a different venue all together. An example of it's practical use in my life is at work. My employer doesn't want me utilizing bit torrent to download pirated media, but if I'm streaming material from some servers in Sweden, he couldn't care less. I have the option of downloading something at my house and burning it to disk or transferring it via jump drive but now I don't have to.
I've also found some shows at http://www.tv-links.co.uk that I've never been able to find on bit torrent (or are extremely poorly seeded) like Alf, Fraggle Rock, Earth 2 (I can't believe anyone even remembers that), The Adventures of Brisco County Jr, etc. Note: I'm not claiming that I'm actively seeking to watch any of those shows.
It wont be a replacement for bit torrent, but it will still be something I use every now and then. I just wanted to share.