With lots of help from Simon, I bought a new PC and even managed to find most of the drivers to get it up and running yesterday.
It's a second hand Compaq: P4 2.8GHz; 1 gig of ram; 40 gig hard drive (fine since I bought the 250 gig drive the previous weekend); DVD burner; ethernet; USB 2.0; Windows XP Pro; and a 17" monitor. Sweet. It's a lot faster than I though I'd be able to get, and the extra ram and XP Pro pushed the price up by about $200 each, so I'm pretty happy to have paid $920 for it. And the DVD burner will make it a lot cheaper to send tv shows to people. (Hint, hint.)
And I need to run VPC so that I can have a WinServer 2003 VPC with SharePoint Portal Server on it, as well as a machine to develop on.
Man, PCs are irritating! They don't just work! I -- well, okay, Simon has to go online for hours and look for all the s33krit drivers required to make it work. This is probably part of the problem with buying a second hand machine, and you're probably all saying, Duh, but this is my weblog, so stating the obvious and complaining about things that can't be fixed is one of my inalienable rights, dammit.
And it's a shame that ted's helpful advice came a little too late, but I don't think it would have changed much. From what I could tell from checking out some of the online suppliers, computers at a computer fair are around about three hundred dollars cheaper. I was also amazed by the number of cool things you can buy for under $30: Bluetooth dongles and USB hubs and internal drives and all kinds of other things, woo.
Now I've just got to worry about keeping the damn thing free of viruses and malware and all those other things. I have a two step plan though: only connect to the ADSL when necessary and Firefox.
* Mission accomplished.
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3 comments:
Actually, HP/Compaq do maintain a reasonable library of drivers provided
a) you know the model number of the machine you need drivers for (check the small print on the bar-coded sticker on the back of the machine - is that it - yay!); and
b) then know which American model number was rebadged for the overseas market as the model recently purchased second hand (thank you HP forums and some anonymous but no doubt equally frustrated New Zealander).
Of course, getting the said drivers to work is another matter. The network and video drivers worked just fine, but the audio driver installer insists that there are no audio drivers available (a 'Severe' warning) - well duh! that's why we're installing the audio drivers - but to no avail. I expect there's a solution, but at that point I gave up in order to buy noodles.
Which reminds me that I should remind Si to remind me to get some goddamned antivirus/firewall protection (that isn't just the crap that comes with XP).
I'm so glad I remembered
Wow, how fucking thick am I? I just found that Miss Linda has a blog. And here it is! And now I can spend the rest of the day catching up on her life. Yippee, I was worried that I might have to do some real work.
Oh wait, I do have to go and do some real work. Well at least I found this. Yippee again.
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