Sean's up and running with 64 bits
Sunday, June 05, 2005
I've been building a PC for my boy Sean this last week. Well, I stuck the components together in the case last Sunday and finally got it all working yesterday. When I booted the thing last week it wouldn't load the OS from the CD and then kept shutting down. After a long afternoon connecting a hydra's head or two of cables and leads and jumpers I didn't do too much investigation into the causes of the failures. My son took it all rather well. Too well, in fact. It was as if seeing his father succeed in something would have been just too surprising.
So I simmered for a week and attacked the box again. In the end I had put it all together correctly but for one small but beatifully formed and rather crucial thing and the failure to boot from the CD was simply because I was trying to install XP Office instead of XP. I'd simply grabbed a jewel case from my shelf and read XP Professional without noticing the important word 'Office' in the middle. Hey! Easy to do when you're under pressure and you've bunged an AMD 64 CPU into a top of the range motherboard and slammed in some crucial memory and a hard disk that's about 60 times bigger than the one in the first PC you put together. And then slotted in a video card that has its own power source. That impressed my son, too.
Oh, and the mysterious shut downs? I'd forgot to attach power to the CPU cooler. Oops. Life is a learning process. Sean is learning to wait patiently while I sort out my mistakes.
So I simmered for a week and attacked the box again. In the end I had put it all together correctly but for one small but beatifully formed and rather crucial thing and the failure to boot from the CD was simply because I was trying to install XP Office instead of XP. I'd simply grabbed a jewel case from my shelf and read XP Professional without noticing the important word 'Office' in the middle. Hey! Easy to do when you're under pressure and you've bunged an AMD 64 CPU into a top of the range motherboard and slammed in some crucial memory and a hard disk that's about 60 times bigger than the one in the first PC you put together. And then slotted in a video card that has its own power source. That impressed my son, too.
Oh, and the mysterious shut downs? I'd forgot to attach power to the CPU cooler. Oops. Life is a learning process. Sean is learning to wait patiently while I sort out my mistakes.
