Anthony’s Ramblings

Last weekend, I helped my mom’s cousin Debbie move some stuff for her boss up to San Rafael. She drove up from Los Angeles Friday night, and we headed up from my place to San Rafael Saturday morning. Since she was up, she brought me her old HP to try to “spruce up”, along with a Dell she was given. Debbie is really partial to Windows 98 (no idea why!), and since her HP was dead I couldn’t do much for her. So, I proposed a little trade. If she gave me the Dell, I’d give her the best system I could build that would run Windows 98. She agreed.

So, about this Dell. It’s a Dimension 4600i that has a 2.8GHz P4 /w hyperthreading, 512 MB of RAM (in dual channel mode, so 2×256), onboard video and sound, and no hard drive. For free, it’s a pretty decent machine. It has an AGP 8x slot, and supports Serial ATA hard drives. So, I decided to put a couple hundred bucks into it to bring it up to speed.

I bought a Serial ATA hard drive, a matched pair of 512MB DDR RAM sticks (for a total of 1.5 GB RAM), and a GeForce 6800XT video card (was open box, $60, I couldn’t pass it up). Since the hard drive didn’t come with a Serial ATA cable, and I was too lazy to run to Fry’s, I decided to install the RAM and video cards first (I previously installed a PATA hard drive).

All went perfect! So, being very excited, I ran to Fry’s and picked up a Serial ATA cable for the hard drive. I ghosted the contents of the old drive over to the new drive and booted the machine up. I’d get to the Windows XP login screen, log in, and as soon as the nVidia control panel application would load, the display would jumble and the computer would crash. So, I was like “what the fuck?!” It was working fine a half hour ago. I am pushing the limits of its power supply…it’s only rated to produce a peak wattage of 170 watts. So, yeah.

I wasn’t about to give up! I took all the hardware I had installed out. I switched back to the PATA hard drive. I booted the machine up, and it’d freeze at the login screen. Okay…so I’ll just wipe the drive and re-install the OS. It would freeze at the initial Windows setup screen! Perhaps I fucked up the power supply…

For the hell of it, I updated the BIOS. This didn’t seem to do any good. I was rather confused as to why the machine was running funky in it’s original configuration. So, for the hell of it, I took the CMOS battery out and let the system sit for a while.

I put the battery back in, booted the machine up with it’s original hardware configuration, and success! So, one by one, I added hardware. First, I added the RAM. The machine was still happy, so I added the hard drive. Nope, unhappy. I remembered that this drive had a jumper setting to force SATA 150, so I set that jumper and the computer became happy again. Last, I added the video card. Nope, the computer became crashy again!

It worked in the beginning, so why wouldn’t it work now? Power supply? I think so. However, I still didn’t give up! I rebooted the computer about a million times, and I finally got it to blue screen. It complained about “nv4_disp”. Aha! When the video card driver initializes, all goes crazy.

I removed the video card (because the system would freeze in SAFE MODE!), booted the machine up, and uninstalled the nVidia drivers. Re-installed the video card, re-installed the video drivers…

And the machine seems happy!

Whew. What an adventure. What a picky video card! The only thing I haven’t done is tried to play a game. We shall see how that goes!