Computer Upgrade

This article is for those of you wondering where my articles have been for the past 2 – 3 weeks. Life with our gadgets, if nothing else, is an adventure.

First I want to say up front that Windows 7 is a smooth operating system that addresses most of the irritations of XP, and now that I have it installed and all updates working, I very much like what Microsoft has done.

The glitches that I encountered during the new system installation were for the most part, self inflicted - even though I have been involved with computers since 1980.

I probably would not have installed or bought Windows 7 if not for a freak lightening strike that took out my satellite modem, hard disk drive, and messed up my motherboard so that it would not boot up without the system disk in the CD-Rom drive. When I realized that I was going to have to replace major components of my computer, saving and preserving my data was suddenly very important to me.

It was during this process that I received a notice from the folks at Newegg.com that I could pre-order Windows 7 for half-price. I had already read the good reviews about Windows 7 so I jumped at the chance to upgrade to the new system at a significant savings. A timeline would put this in August of 2009. The biggest problem I had now was to make do with what I had until the October 22nd release of the new operating system. I bought two new hard drives, one for archiving my data and the other one for a clean install of XP.

A clean install meant that all of my programs would have to be reinstalled. It took XP about two hours to install itself and another two to three hours to download all the latest updates. (My original system disk was at least 2 years old.) Altogether, it took me the better part of two days to get up and running again. In the process, I found out the hard drive that I thought was damaged was not damaged and that it was the motherboard causing the strange boot up problems. Even on a new hard drive with a clean install, I still had to have the system disk in the CD/DVD drive to boot.

The chipset on my ASUS motherboard turned out to be the problem and I could not find a software update for my AMD 590 chipset. This meant that I would have to go the hardware upgrade route.

You can buy a new motherboard in lots of flavors with numerous chipset and CPU configurations. Each combination of motherboard and chipset has its place concerning speed, economics, and features. I chose to buy one of the latest and greatest with the hope that time would not eclipse it so fast. The new motherboard meant that I also had to upgrade my memory and CPU; the other components would not be affected. (Power supply, computer case, hard drives, CD/DVD drives, video card, and monitor.)

For the record, a clean rebuild is easier than replacing just a few of the major components. Wiring harnesses and other installed components manage to get in the way and make upgrading a real pain. So after laboriously installing the new parts, I turned the computer on for the first time - it would not post. Posting is the process a computer goes through when you turn on your computer. When power is applied, the computer checks for hardware errors. Whenever a component does not respond properly an error is generated and the error checking process stops. At that point, the offending component has to be fixed or the computer will not work.

Fortunately for me, my new motherboard came equipped with an LED readout that shows a code of the post operations. When the post stopped, it gave me a code that I could look up to find out what was wrong. In this case it was one of the memory modules that I had installed. Removing the memory modules one at a time quickly located the one that was causing the errors. The memory sticks were a part of the upgrade because my previous system used the DDR2 memory and the new motherboard had to have the DDR3 memory. Long story short, I got the computer running with only one-half of the new memory.

I want to say a word about the company that made my memory. They were very nice and issued a RMA for the bad memory stick’s return, and have shipped me a new memory module. I expect it any day now. So if any of you buy memory for your computer, you might want to consider the Corsair brand of memory. For no other reason than they offer you service if you should ever need it.

When I do install my new memory module, my computer will be complete. But there was another adventure I want to relate to you and that is the Windows 7 installation. I will write about that in the next article. I was going to include it in this writing, but it made the article longer than I wanted.

Cheers,

-Robert-