Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
Has anyone else here had the unbelievable misfortune to work on an ECS K7SOM?
I get asked to upgrade machines to Windows XP pretty regularly, and I'm mostly nice enough to sit down and click "Next" a couple times for $30 or so.
Usually, it's an utterly painless process.
This thing, though, bluescreens in the middle of PNP detection.
Hmm?
No way to back out of THAT, so I start disabling hardware. USB2, then floppy, then everything else. Still bluescreens, but... later in the install.
Maybe it's RAM, I think, opening up this little crap factory to replace the DIMM.
My god, it's full of... crap.
AMR slot, 2 PCIs including a PCTel winmodem, and in what may very well be a mark of the beast, an AthlonXP1400+ soldered directly to the motherboard. Worse yet, its fan was glued on the CPU.
Hoolie Doolie, I thought they stopped doing that stuff in 1994!
I swapped the Apacer 256MB module with a Crucial stick, and things still bluescreened, until I dropped the shared video memory to 32MB. THAT let me finish the install.
... the board behaved a little bit oddly, though. Windows XP kept asking me to insert a disk in drive A:. Mind you, the FDD controller was disabled.
Eventually, I managed to get all the drivers loaded off a CD I'd made before I started this little adventure, and I figured the problem would go away as I re-enabled devices on the motherboard.
Boy, was I wrong.
The floppy-related weirdness got WORSE once the drive was enabled, and even worse than that, Windows has the happy little "floppy pause" that you get when it reads something off a floppy. Playing a sound locked the PC (no IRQ problems).
It's probably the board, but the customer was adamant. NO more WinME.
So I try my damndest to get Win98SE on the machine. That's like ME, but better, I said, cooly, as I slipped in my unattended install CD.
Bang. Lockup, and someplace weird: setting the time zone.
So I do things manually, safest command line options, every trick I can think of (disable everything on the board again, even).
Still no go.
At this point, I say, OK, gotta be a dead board, but, to humor the customer, I pop in his (ECS-branded) ghost restore disk and bring him back to WinME.
... and everything is perfect. Every single thing works, no lockups or errors. No problems whatsoever. My USB2 pen drive even works in USB2 mode.
Un-frickin'-real.
If Compaq started using these things, I'd say it's the computer Satan would be sitting in hell using. That bad.
I get asked to upgrade machines to Windows XP pretty regularly, and I'm mostly nice enough to sit down and click "Next" a couple times for $30 or so.
Usually, it's an utterly painless process.
This thing, though, bluescreens in the middle of PNP detection.
Hmm?
No way to back out of THAT, so I start disabling hardware. USB2, then floppy, then everything else. Still bluescreens, but... later in the install.
Maybe it's RAM, I think, opening up this little crap factory to replace the DIMM.
My god, it's full of... crap.
AMR slot, 2 PCIs including a PCTel winmodem, and in what may very well be a mark of the beast, an AthlonXP1400+ soldered directly to the motherboard. Worse yet, its fan was glued on the CPU.
Hoolie Doolie, I thought they stopped doing that stuff in 1994!
I swapped the Apacer 256MB module with a Crucial stick, and things still bluescreened, until I dropped the shared video memory to 32MB. THAT let me finish the install.
... the board behaved a little bit oddly, though. Windows XP kept asking me to insert a disk in drive A:. Mind you, the FDD controller was disabled.
Eventually, I managed to get all the drivers loaded off a CD I'd made before I started this little adventure, and I figured the problem would go away as I re-enabled devices on the motherboard.
Boy, was I wrong.
The floppy-related weirdness got WORSE once the drive was enabled, and even worse than that, Windows has the happy little "floppy pause" that you get when it reads something off a floppy. Playing a sound locked the PC (no IRQ problems).
It's probably the board, but the customer was adamant. NO more WinME.
So I try my damndest to get Win98SE on the machine. That's like ME, but better, I said, cooly, as I slipped in my unattended install CD.
Bang. Lockup, and someplace weird: setting the time zone.
So I do things manually, safest command line options, every trick I can think of (disable everything on the board again, even).
Still no go.
At this point, I say, OK, gotta be a dead board, but, to humor the customer, I pop in his (ECS-branded) ghost restore disk and bring him back to WinME.
... and everything is perfect. Every single thing works, no lockups or errors. No problems whatsoever. My USB2 pen drive even works in USB2 mode.
Un-frickin'-real.
If Compaq started using these things, I'd say it's the computer Satan would be sitting in hell using. That bad.
