My neighbours are researching what is going to be necessary to set up a network between our two houses, which are 600 feet apart, so that we can share their sattelite internet service and split the cost. As part of this, we set up a network in their home in preparation for the eventual link between the houses (still researching best xmit median).

When we went down to the metromess to pick up parts, I came across a 100 gig hard drive on sale for $139. In dire need of more storage, I jumped on the sale. Much later that night, after getting back from getting their network up and running, I proceeded to install the hard drive in my home PC - which is not a newer machine by any means. I had the expected problem with the bios, and followed their directions to install and use their overlay software to make it all work. The PC immediately rendered itself unuseable. I tried removing the new drive and reinstalling the old ones. Still no luck. Called it a night and called Western Digital the following morning. We were on the phone for over 45 minutes trying to bring the PC back up. Best that could be done was to get it to the login screen, which after typing the password, would just loop back to the login, despite accepting the pw as valid.

Needing to get other things done, I let it go untill I got back home from running errands. When I got home, I went to the neighbours and picked up the Win2k CD that we were using to set up the server and network the night before. On the way back home, I decided that it was high time to install the PIII 650 processor and motherboard that I had bought from a friend a couple of months ago. It needed a controller card, which the neighbour had and gave to me, as the on board controller was shot.

I disassembled the old P 266 system and installed the "new" board and processor. One immediate small problem. I needed to buy a new modem, as I had three old ISA boards, and only one ISA slot in the "new" machine. Not wanting to drive back to the metromess, I elected to pay the high prices of our local PC shop. $60 later, I had a new USR modem.

Time came for me to fire up the new system. No dice. The add on IDE controller would not work with the motherboard. We made several attempts to get it running, up to an including using a different controller card. Still no go. Now good and mad, I've decided that I've had enough, and elected to go buy a new board to eliminate the known problems of the current one.

I get down to the place where I originally bought the hard drive the previous day. On the way down, I decide that the old chassis is too beat up and missing too much stuff to continue to be used.

I get there and select this awesome server style box with tons of additional cooling capacity, well built, lots 'o space for only $139. Time for a motherboard. There are NO slot 1 boards left, and apparently they aren't going to sell any more. Now I'm in immediate need of both a new processor AND a new motherboard.

Well, now I've decided that I need to just get the damned upgrade done and over with.

Now, in place of a 266mhz Pentium pc, I now have a 1.5 ghz, P IV machine complete with a new CD ROM burner, 256 meg of ram, "new" AGP video card (bought used), 10 gig main, and 100 gig secondary drives (the drives came up perfectly in this thing), new SCSI card, and a new modem (56K), for the total of $600.

I moved my old CDrom drive (54X), floppy drive, network card, SCSI zip disk, as well as reused the current 17' monitor, and the printer that I had only bought a couple of weeks earler.

What started out as a measly $140 hard drive, resulted in a grand total of $800 into a new PC. Oh well, I needed to replace it anyway.

I HATE workiing on computers.