Spent six hours yesterday putting together my new comp. Well, Lena and Matt were doing all the work, I was supervising. I just love watching other people work. Made Lena connect practically everything, all the available USBs (which I probably will need, I wasn't just being cruel), front firewire (that I might need, so just in case), front audio (that I will definitely never use). Tried to make her connect the COM port (for the life of me I can't come up with anything it might ever be useful for), but it didn't quite fit in the slot, so I let that go. Unfortunately, they've greatly improved the connectors and I was deprived of a chance to see Lena struggle with all the tiny little pins. Bummer.
Ran into weirdest and completely unexpected problems. Mismatching power for starters. Turns out they went and changed standards for ATX, and the motherboard was already on the new standard (24-pin) while power supply was still just 20-pin, which caught everybody by surprise. After much investigating by Matt we stuck the 20-pin connector into 24-pin slot. Amazingly enough, it worked. Then WinXP, Microsoft being at the forefront of modern technology and all, refused to recognize my SATA HD. Matt found the drivers for it, though, and put them on a floppy. The catch was - I didn't get a floppy for this comp, on Matt's advice, because really, who needs a floppy when you have a CDRW and memory sticks? Well, we had to take the floppy from my Dell and use that (and Dell with their twisted idea of useable cases and nonstandard connectors is a whole other story).

( Посмотреть в полный размер, 134 килобайт )After much frustration, XP agreed that there was indeed a 300 Gig HD attached and even installed itself. Next logical step was downloading updates for XP, at which point, after an hour's struggle, we realized that my LinkSys router was broken. Still didn't figure out what's wrong with it, only agrees to connect to some sites: opens Google without a hitch, some sites takes a small eternity to open, refuses to acknowledge existence of microsoft.com altogether. Eventually gave up and connected directly through the modem.
So, now it's up and running and all I need is to find Office XP somewhere and I am all set. It's a beautiful machine, though. And the case is fantastic (and I don't just mean the blue front LEDs). Adding stuff to this after dealing with Dell for so many years will be pure pleasure.