Double damn.  The Social Director of the Internecks has a tag she uses for this kind of stuff.  Fuckity fuck fuck fuck.  This story goes back a few weeks now, to the days I was trying to upgrade the grafx card on this aging P4 Dell Dimension.  Long story short, first I couldn’t run the app because the grafx card suckt.  Then I installed a new grafx card and the computer wouldn’t start.  Then I put the old one back and the computer still wouldn’t start.  Then I put a different new one in and the computer wouldn’t start.  Then I put the old one back in and this time the computer worked.

So I bought a grafx card for a different slot.  Since the computer was hosed and sucky whenever I touched the AGP slot, I thought, well you know, maybe a PCI grafx card would be cool and life would improve and by god things were cool and life did improve until the computer just up and crashed.  Fuckity fuck fuck fuck

Well, I swapped the old grafx card back in and took the new grafx card out and I got the damn thing running and life looked good and then it crashed again.  And I promised myself a really good back-up if I could get it running - which I did, and sure as god made alligators the son-of-a-bitch crashed again right in the middle of the back-up taht I had hoped would be really good but now was simply hosed and sucky.  Fuckity fuck fuck fuck

I was jotting down the diagnostic codes that appeared on the blue screen each time the unit crashed and I looked a couple of them up and I got the suspicion that I had a disk problem, and I was really sad that I had no back-up.  But I have two hard drives in the unit and I thought to myself, self - I thought, you really oughta check the ribbon connector before you go too far, and so I disconnected the connector that hooks up the hard drive to the other hard drive to the motherboard and I put in a good one that I had in a junk drawer, and I was lazy so I only hooked up the one hard drive and damned if that didn’t work.  Life was good.

And the computer did not crash.

So I took a good back up of that 30 GB drive and I thought to myself, self - I thought, now would be the time to hook up the second hard drive, the 160 MB one with all your pictures and web files and such on it.  So hook it up I did and the computer crashed.  Fuckity fuck fuck fuck

At least now I had a clue.  So, much doinking around later, I was spinning deeper and deeper into corrupt files that were not letting me boot up.  The computer had the upper hand and my oxygen was running out.  There’s something called the hal.dll

HAL stands for hardware abstraction layer, but if you’ve seen 2024, then you know that things were a lot worse than a few corrupted files.  The son-of-a-bitch was singing “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer doooo…” at a lower and lower frequency until finally it just died and I was glad.

I reloaded a fresh copy of XP.  This took me through the Microsoft software licensing police zone.  Safely through the zone, I ended up here in my office on a Saturday night with the bad hard drive in a baggy, the redundant grafx card in its packaging ready to be returned to Best Buy, a freshly installed and unpatched version of Windows XP SP1, and an order entered for a Dell XPS 400 system and a 19 inch digital flat panel monitor.  Some people might be wary about diving back into Dell, but there are four Dell PCs in this house of varying builds and vintages and they all work. 

In fact, Dell support called me when I started whining about this stuff, and they would have been happy to share my frustration.  I’ve been second guessing myself, because I’m more like a quasi informed end user than I am a geek.  Maybe if I’d been smart enough to “expand” the hal.dll that I “copied” into the system32 directory life would have been good.  But I think the short answer is, this unit is no longer stable and I need a stable platform. 

fuckity fuck fuck fuck