YES!!!!!!!!!!!! I have a desktop again.

[kyrielle]

It's not yet really usable because it's patching its ever-loving little heart out, but it has its own C drive, all three of my drives, and everything else in and supposedly running. It may need a graphics card to run WoW, we are going to check on that when it's installed, but otherwise it's good. It's a nice little box.

Technically it has two open slots for drives. Non-technically, it would lead to things overheating. OTOH, it has one drive I can sacrifice if I want to add another drive later (it has a DVD-writer and a DVD-rom; I'd happily eject the latter if I needed the slot).

It is on the network, working, happy as a clam. Now there's just tons of installs. And all three drives came up fine. Scott has a theory. The drive that they said "failed" was the one with WoW on it. And in order to get it to work the first time, he had to make settings in the Bios to tell it about the drive and its size - it didn't detect it on its own. So we're betting the problem lay, not with the drive, but with the Bios possibly not having those settings still (maybe due to work Fry's did, maybe due to the power-fry that took out the video card also). The drive came up in this computer with no fussing.

Way, way too much money and stress, but I see the light at the end of the tunnel and - wonder of wonders! - I don't think it's a train! :) (After all, I don't play EQ any more, just WoW.)

Comments

[pheon.livejournal.com]

Great! Where did you buy this computer?

[kyrielle]

Fry's. But this time we made the poor sales associate open the box and let US look at it (mostly Scott) to make sure all the pieces were there. It's a Sony with a full tower case. Not pretty, runs great. I'm happy. Now to get the graphics problems sorted out. (WoW runs. But it's daaark. Not good.)

[pheon.livejournal.com]

So, what did you do with the old defunct machine?

[kyrielle]

Right now, it's sitting in front of the closet doors here, open to the world and a tangled mess. We aren't 100% sure we're done cannibalizing bits, though it's 99.9% at this point.

I'm not so confident of that disk as I was. WoW had started, recently, freezing on exit. I thought it was the fact that the old computer was under spec for it. It just did it again on the new one. I'm moving it to another drive. If it then seems to work for a few runs, I think I will probably move everything off that drive and junk it. I hate giving up drives, but they're not so expensive I want to risk lost data.

[pheon.livejournal.com]

I asked because I wanted to offer to take it down for FreeGeek when you are finished picking over the carcass, unless you have other plans for it.

And I definitely agree: disk drives are less of a loss than data.

[kyrielle]

I'd be happy to send the remains to FreeGeek, with a warning that the power supply and video are (we've been told) quite dead, and I'd consider the motherboard suspect.

I'll have a monitor to go, too, since mine finally finished going too dark and I know they recycle them properly. And a check, being as there's a monitor involved. Assuming you are willing to haul that much. :)

[pheon.livejournal.com]

FreeGeek tests all the components themselves, so I don't have to tell them anything. And yes, one of the things I really like about them is that they recycle monitors correctly. [Do you know how much lead there is inside that screen?]

Another thing I like is that when they get a machine with a hard drive in it, the first thing they do is format the hard drive. Nobody's info leaks out.

Yes, I am perfectly happy to haul all that and cover the monitor.

[kyrielle]

I can cover the monitor but if you want to, I shan't complain. Thank you for being willing to haul it - I avoid having to deal with parking, which is really nice to avoid. :)