Beanboy89's Blog: 12/01/2006

Merry Christmas

I hope everyone is having a safe, enjoyable, and happy Christmas!

I'll get around to posting a comprehensive outline and review of my Christmas in the next few days.

First snow of the season

This evening at about 7:55, it started snowing for the first time this year. It was a light snow, and it hardly stuck to the ground, but it was indeed snow.

Snow was reported at the NWS's reporting station in York:
[Weather STAR 4000 Emulator showing Light Snow observation]

[Weather STAR 4000 Emulator showing Light Snow observation]

The Weather STAR 4000 Emulator showing a "Light Snow" observation.

By 8:05, it looks like the snow has stopped.

If you'll recall last year, our season's first snow happened on November 23, 2005.

Done with that (well, just about)

I'm about 95% complete on my Graduation Project. For those that don't know, all High School students in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania must complete a Graduation Project in order to graduate from High School. The project can be basically anything from a minimum 30 hours of community service, to constructing a shed, or just about anything else constructive. Me, I chose to build a computer.

The long road, figuratively speaking, for me started back in November of 2005 when my old Pentium III machine finally kicked the bucket (well I tried to install Windows NT4 onto a dying hard drive), but that's a totally different story that I won't dive into right now. But after that happened, I decided to order some new parts to modernize that five-year-old machine.

Now step a few months into the future...July 2006 when I finally decide to order the parts for my main project, which was to build a computer from scratch. When all the parts arrived in August, I took a Friday evening to assemble all the parts the best I could. When I thought I had everything together, I powered up the machine, but ran into problem after problem, like the power button not wanting to work properly, the optical disk drive not working, and various other trivial issues. Finally, a few weeks later, I was looking closely, and I discovered a power wire to the motherboard wasn't properly connected. After I corrected that issue, the machine booted. I was able to finally get a video signal, access the BIOS, and load the Windows setup program. I was able to boot from a Windows CD, and at least load the text-based portion of the setup. When I got to the partition disk screen, I found out that setup couldn't detect my hard drive, thus I wasn't able to partition the drive or install Windows. This was in September.

The computer basically sat in a non-working state for about two months, until over my Thanksgiving vacation I finally took the machine to a local repair shop to have them look at it. I took it in at around 2:30 PM, and by 4:30, they called and said that it was working! When I came and picked it up, they told me that I had been using a floppy disk IDE cable to attach the hard drive, thus I wasn't able to setup Windows. It cost me $11 for 15 minutes of work to tell me that I had messed up. Oh well, something that I probably would've found on my own.

That night, I got Windows Server 2003 x64 installed, but shortly, I noticed some issues, like missing drivers. I was expecting to have some, though, since I've heard horror stories regarding Windows x64 drivers. The most important thing to me was getting my D-Link DWL-510 802.11g adapter working so that I could get on the internet. I had searched PlanetAMD64 for the correct drivers, and I thought that I had found a match, but the drivers just didn't work.

Finally, I decided to install Windows Vista and give that a try, hoping that I'd be more likely to find drivers for Vista x86 than Server 2003 x64. I was right. After installing Vista (which took less than a half an hour), Vista detected my network card out right out of the box. I had to install no drivers for it.

I am very impressed with Vista on this machine. It runs quickly, and believe it or not, the user interface is not as bad as I expected nor anticipated it would be.

Here's a quick overview of the machine: