Fiendish Games

Though I bristled when she said it, I think Mrs. Fiendish is right. I have plenty of knowledge of how to fix computers but very limited aptitude in applying it. Yes, it is another tale of how I made a hash of sorting out a PC.

Background

We bought number 2 son a TV/monitor for Christmas. It has a 22" screen, built in Freeview, and connectors on the back for a TV aerial, VGA, DVI, HDMI, USB and, for all I know, a Linz-Donowitz iron ore smelter.

The screen would replace his rather quaint looking, almost square (in the literal sense of the word) 15" flat screen monitor and, we hoped, also the big cathode ray tube (CRT) 28" screen TV antique in the corner which he uses for his X-Box games and watching TV, even though the colours are going and everything on it looks kind of green.

On opening the present he displayed all the joy that a child might on receiving an encyclopaedia (in Greek) for Christmas. He plugged his PC in to the monitor, but kept the old CRT monstrosity for watching TV and playing on the X-Box.

Attempts to get him to at least try his X-box with the new monitor met with the indolence and apathy for which he is justly renowned. Conversely, we could hardly keep number one son (aka Mr. Fiddle Faddle) off it.

I must confess I was a trifle miffed. I'd spent about £180 on his pressie and though it may not have been something he wanted, I thought it was something he needed. Then again, he mainly uses his PC for MSN Messenger and Football Manager. At least, I reasoned, the 22" screen would come into its own when he did likewise on those occasions when the bedroom door is locked.

Fire down in the hole

Still, and all, perhaps it was because he was still using the old 1980's technology of a VGA connector that he wasn't appreciating the whole ... er ... digitality of the monitor's brilliance.

So, I resolved to upgrade his PC's graphics card so that he could connect via the DVI (Digital Visual Interface) input on the back of the monitor.

I spent just over £30 buying a graphics card - a PNY GeForce 8600 GTS, DDR3 256 MB card, if you must know (making the third PC in the house with an 8600GT card) - and collected it in person from some bloke in Harlow. Now, I am an Essex boy, so I am allowed to say this, but the estate he lived on looked like something out of The Wire. Not especially run down, just concrete and soullless.

I digress.

After I got the card home, the fun started.

The fifteen circles of hell


Step one: Insert the card in PCI Express slot. Install drivers. PC recognises existence of card. This is a good sign.

Step two: Attach DVI lead to graphics card at one end, PC monitor at the other. Switch off PC. No point having two leads going into the monitor, so I remove VGA lead from PC and monitor.

Step three: Switch on PC. Get blank screen. Message on screen says to check signal cable.

Step four: Plug VGA lead back into on board graphics chip connector and t'other end into monitor. Hey, look, it's Windows Vista. Yes, I know. Home Edition, too. It's what the PC came with.

Step five: Reboot, with both monitor leads plugged in. Go into BIOS, tell PC to use the PCI Express connection.

Step six: Reboot, but with just the DVI lead plugged in. Get blank screen. Scratch head. Plug in VGA lead. Hey, it's Windows Vista.

Step seven: Check drivers and what not. All appears to be hunky dory. Must be the power supply unit (PSU). Only 200 watts? No wonder!

Step eight: Replace PSU with very nice EZCool 550w jobbie with a fan large enough to get a Spitfire into flight.

Step nine: Still no joy. It's not the PSU.

Step ten: Must be the cable. Go downstairs, get my DVI cable. Plug that in. No joy. It's not the cable, no matter how many times the monitor tells me it is.

Step eleven: I didn't want to do this, but the time had come for me to try the graphics card in another PC and see if that bloke from The Wire had ripped me off.

Step twelve: He had not. The graphics card works in number three son's PC and, to the chagrin of number one son (who used to own number three son's PC), it has a slightly higher Windows Experience score than the overclocked 8600GT in number three son's rig. Must be the DDR3 RAM. You can stop yawning, now.

Step thirteen: Take aforementioned overclocked 8600GT graphics card that was working fine in number three son's PC and put it into number 2 son's PC. Get a blank screen.

Step fourteen: Scratch head really hard. Go into menu system of TV/monitor. Highlight DVI entry on screen and press 'OK'. Does nothing. All it does is move a little dot from the VGA panel to the DVI panel. Try the same with VGA entry. Does nothing. All it does is move a little dot from the DVI entry to the VGA entry.

Step fifteen: Try something illogical (I was desperate). Number three son only has a VGA monitor, and his graphics card (the one now in number two son's PC) only has DVI output connectors, so we use DVI/VGA converters to connect his graphics card to his monitors. Decide to try DVI/VGA converter on graphics card now plugged in to number 2 son's PC. So, using a VGA to VGA signal cable but with a VGA/DVI converter on the graphics card end, I tried once more.

As I say, totally illogical, but it worked.

You are probably way ahead of me here. The clue was back in step 14. However, at this stage I was thinking "I have a PC with a graphics card that finally works, but it still plugs into the bleeding VGA input connection on the monitor, and the whole point of all this fart-arsing about was to go digital, man."

Still, at least the message on the monitor was correct, and the problem had been the signal cable, even though all the cables I had used had worked on other PCs. Perhaps, thought I, I should pay more attention to the status messages on the monitor (perhaps I should have read the fricking manual but, then, I am a bloke - though to be fair, I do normally read manuals before I start setting up electrical goods.)

It was at this point that I noticed that when I switched on the monitor, the status message said "VGA".

I had an idea. At last. I went back into the menu and moved that bloody little dot from VGA to DVI, connected the DVI-to-DVI cable from the graphics card to the DVI connector on the monitor and ... hey, it's Windows Vista, and a welcome screen saying:

What took you so long, you moron!


Lessons to be learnt

1. It does not do any harm to RTFM
2. A little knowledge and all that. Why was my first thought to change the PSU and not to pay heed to the error message on the telly? Because the PSU route is the geeky solution
3. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
4. Don't assume that even modern equipment is clever enough to work out that just because you have plugged something in to one connector and no others, that's the connector you want to lead. Though I note, that my old CRT is clever enough to know whether I want to use the DVD machine, the video player or the digital video recorder.

For what it is worth, the Windows Experience score on the graphics front has zoomed up from 3.1 to 5.8 on number 2 son's PC. I am sure he will appreciate it the next time he is watching coloured dots ricochet round the pitch on Football Manager.

Of course, now his processor chip is dragging down the performance of the system, and if there is one thing that will improve the number crunching delight that is Football Manager, it is a faster CPU (central processing unit). I just need to wait for my order of thermal paste to arrive and ...

Radio Caroline has been giving a lot of airplay to the new single from Julian Lennon and James Scott Cook. It's a lightweight song but it is growing on me.

Though it is a song for charity, it has the advantage of being for a charity small enough to suggest that the gesture is a personal one rather than a shameless attempt to get a bit of cheap publicity. As I understand it, proceeds from sales of the single go towards the treatment of the autoimmune disease lupus.

The song is called Lucy and if the name seems familiar, that's because Julian's childhood friend Lucy Vodden suffered from it. She was the Lucy who, so the legend has it, was the inspiration for Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.

Saw Avatar in 3D over Christmas and did not regret it. A bit long, utterly predictable, but visually breathtaking.

I think the director, James Cameron, fell in love with his creation. 'I've designed this creature, I am now going to spend three minutes of the film demosntrating how it can fly, swoop, scream, land, walk and tap-dance.'

A lot of it should have been saved for the DVD extras.

It does build to a cracking if totally obvious conclusion, but otherwise it is a bit langorous.

Contrast the approach with Star Wars, where Lucas creates a menagerie of aliens and mostly uses them as background characters in a bar scene.

Apart from that, and one glorious evening getting legless (after reading that you get fewer hangovers as you get older because your brain shrinks), it was an agreeably lazy, dull, self indulgent break.

I had about 20 things on my 'To Do' list, and did about five of them. Chief among them was installing my new 300GB hard disk drive on my PC and reinstalling Windows XP.

Switch off now if computer tales bore you.

The new hard disk is a SATA disk. Not exactly new technology, but it was at the time Windows XP was released. Pay attention; this will become relevant later.

I already had two old technology IDE (PATA) hard disks in my PC case and was unsure whether I could add a SATA drive too. I knew I had the motherboard connection, I was just concerned that the two rival disk technologies would fight for control of the operating system.

The good news is that SATA and PATA drives can live happily side by side in the same system. My bigger PATA drive is still configured as a 'master' and the smaller PATA drive as the 'slave', but the operating system boots to the new SATA drive thanks to me changing the BIOS settings. If needs be, I can boot to my old set-up simply by changing the boot order.

Anyway, I whacked in the SATA drive to my existing set-up and though the BIOS recognised it, Windows XP would not. This was not unexpected, as I had done a bit of research and knew XP did not automatically recognise SATA drives.

So, I plugged it in to number three son's Vista machine and formatted it on that rig.

I took the drive back down to my XP machine, plugged it in, and, if memory serves, XP could now see it. I had partitioned the drive into three partitions and so was able to transfer over some data from the old drives to the new drive. Also, I tok the time to download the SATA drivers and store them somewhere on the disk, along with service packs 2 and 3.

Time to reinstall Windows.

Step one: disconnect from the Internet to stop any nasty invasions before I had installed the service packs.

Step two: Put in the installation disk. Run set-up. Hit F6 when prompted to load drivers.

Step three: WTF? I can only load the drivers from a floppy drive?

Step four: Pop floppy in drive. It whirs away but nothing is being read.

Step five: Remember that floppy drive is about 20 years old and has a cable connector interface that allows for the cable to be put in upside down. Open case. Put cable lead in t'other way.

Step six: Check floppy drive. Success!

Step seven: Repeat step two.

Step eight: Success. Do lap of house in celebration, whooping and hollering like a lunatic.

Step nine: Install service pack 2. Install service pack 3 (not sure if SP3 includes SP2 but better safe than sorry).

Step ten: Reconnect internet.

Step eleven: Wireless adaptor not recognised. Had it in my head XP would do this automatically. Rather than RTFM I waste an hour or so pissing around with Device Manager.

Step twelve: RTFM. Ah. Fish out driver disk. All is sorted.

Steps thirteen to infinity: Piss about reintalling those apps I want to keep. Back up old drives to new drive. Delete and merge a few partitions on old drive to create bigger partitions.

Step infinity plus one: Install Railroad Tycoon II. Big mistake. There goes my life. Realise now why I have waited 11 years or whatever to finally install this ("Those of you with 64k or more of RAM may be able to play the game with all the settings on 11").

Notice Railroad Tycoon II supports network play. Idly wonder whether Woody, Warne, Oakes, Siggins et al still have a copy of the game. There goes my second life.

The drive partitioning exercise was ... er ... interesting. You are always taking your life into your hands messing around with the file structure of a hard drive.

I used Partition Magic 6, which is quite a few years old now, and as a result it probably had problems recognising the huge hard drives we take for granted now. It claimed my SATA drive was bad. Not that I cared; I had already partitioned that drive when I formatted it.

Unfortunately, the software would not work on my old drives either.

Undaunted, I logged on to the Internet and found not one but about three highly rated disk partitioning packages that are free. The only two I can remember are Partition Wizard and Easeus. I downloaded the former, and used it to delete a partition and merge it with the adjacent partition.

Bingo! It worked.

Take that, Partition Magic!

Now to delete another partition, move the adjacent partition to the left, and add the unallocated spacee to its newly adjacent partition.

Nope, not having it. Disk errors. I ran every disk test Partition Wizard had, but no joy.

Back to Partition Magic. "Your disk has errors. Would you like Partition Magic to fix them?".

Yes. Yes, I would, thank you very much. Sorry for those beastly things I said about you half an hour ago.'

So, Partition Magic fixed the errors. Did one out of the three operations I wanted it to do (delete a partition) and then, after appearing to do the other two actions, told me after a 20 minute wait that the operations had been cancelled, because my file system has no input/output function.

Oh, that old thing.

A quick Google later, and some genius on a forum suggested the error was caused by a gap in the drive letters (my drives went J,K,M,N,O - no 'L' drive).

So, back to Partition Wizard to assign drive letters (couldn't find a way of doing this in Partition Magic though there probably is a tool).

Back to Partition Magic, to complete the moving and the merging of partitions.

Cue another lap of celebration of the house.

There really is some fantastic free software out there at the moment (e.g. Paragon Backup 10, Audacity, CCleaner, Malwarebytes Anti-Malware and so on).

Somewhere you can probably even get the setup files from an abandonware site for Railroad Tycoon II.