Yesterday after work I swing by Fry's (or darn, I had to go to Fry's again... heh) and picked up a cheap Hard Drive and a reasonably priced case.
The smallest HD I could find was 40G and $90. What happened to cheap drives? I guess $90 isn't really to bad at all, though it's funny that you can't find small drives anywhere. 40G is small! I remember when 40M was LARGE!
Hey, you kids, get offa my lawn!
Sorry. Having a geezer moment there.
The case is a cute box with lots of flashy lights and fans and a clear side panel... I dunno, a Scorpion RAIDMAX or something. The important thing is that it has drive bays inside, enough for all of my bits and with room left over.
I'm pretty sure the computer runs a bit faster, too, with this slick case.
So, it takes a couple of hours to carefully disassemble the old HP box and re-assemble it all in the new box.
The printing on some of those pins on the board was microscopic! I pulled out the handy 10x jeweler's loupe, though, and figured out where to put my power switch, etc. Us geezers are crafty!
So, another hour of dicking around with Windows, it's installed. Now my machine is a dual boot Win 2K,which is damned annoying, since I only want to boot on the new drive. I haven't found a way to convince the box that the old RAID pair isn't a valid Windows boot yet. Instead, I just set some flags to force it to boot on the new one without asking the user.
But somehow, someday, I hope to find a way to safely pull Windows off the RAID pair, just to avoid possible future mistakes.
I didn't have time to pull down the ten thousand or so (okay, I'm exaggerating) service packs and updates yet... I'll continue that on Friday. Then I need to re-install those apps that need registry support. But just a few. No need to go crazy.
Sigh. All I really want to do is write. All this other hassle is, I'm sure, all Microsoft's fault somehow. They owe me! I want my time back! Maybe I should get a Mac....
Nah.