And with that, POW!

Gone. Just gone. 

That’s the best way to describe the state of my desktop right now. My secondary hard drive went from being detected saturday night to disappearing when I woke up yesterday. I couldn’t find any sort of reason for it online, so I shrugged and restarted, chalking it up to another one of those really weird Windows quirks that not even the boys up in Redmond can explain. When my computer rebooted, it gave me an unnerving two beeps from the internal speaker. That’s not generally a good thing. I got an error screen explaining that neither of my hard drives (SATA 0 and SATA 2, for those of you that care) could not be found. 

I tried to do a repair from my Windows disk, hoping that it would somehow magically fix the problem (yes, I realized that it was a thoroughly illogical thing to do – can’t fix the operating system if you can’t find the HDD it’s located on). One of my more knowledgeable friends suggested that my SATA ports were bad. That made sense to me, so I switched the drives to my other two SATA ports and restarted. I activated those ports in the BIOS, and voila! Still no drives recognized. I don’t have any old IDE drives, so I can’t bypass the problem that way. Essentially, even though only one feature no longer works on my motherboard, it has been rendered useless.

This presents me with a conundrum.

Skydrive

Apparently, Windows offers 25Gb of free storage called SkyDrive with any Windows Live ID. Given my activities, this will be useful for backing up important documents, and for uploading pictures/video for use in posts like this.

Signing in to SkyDrive is done easily enough with any Windows Live ID (if you use Hotmail, Messenger, of XBox Live, it’s the same ID). If you don’t already have an account with them, signing up is free and fairly straight-forward.

Computer Reformat

It was a long and arduous journey, but my computer’s completely and thoroughly reformatted. Everything is clean and new and shiny, and I haven’t lost or accidentally misplaced any files (so far). It was… an interesting experience, and I’ll elaborate on this post later after I’ve gotten some pics uploaded and finished up a couple projects.

Over the past four days, I’ve:

• Pulled an all-nighter in an attempt to get the reformat knocked out quickly and move on with my life, only to have the error-checking I’d scheduled for the next reboot take from 5pm Monday night to 7am Tuesday morning.
• Almost forgot to export all my important stuff to an external drive.
• Just about had a heart attack after I reinstalled iTunes only to be told that it couldn’t locate any of my music.
• Felt guilty for putting off a music review I agreed to do before starting the reformat.
• Tried to install more RAM even though I knew that one of them had been DOA when I bought them.
• Took out my secondary HDD for the reformat, and had my PC complain that SATA 2 was enabled in BIOS but there wasn’t anything there. I was too lazy to change it. When I put it back in, the comp wouldn’t recognize it, even though I’d never technically disabled it.
• Ranted against Microsoft for making the Microsoft Update site an Internet Explorer-only thing. It’s so dumb! I hate IE. Firefox+Chrome FTW.

And most recently, I just received an email (that I hope was clever spam) asking me to review a male enhancement product on my blog. Because, you know, that’s clearly relevant to the content on here. *end sarcasm*

Super Happy Fun Reformat Computer Time

This isn’t exactly a recent development, but my computer needs a reformat. Wipe the slate clean, so to speak. I decided a few hours ago that it was time to bite the bullet when I was forced to restart my desktop three times in fifteen minutes. That kind of instability falls pretty solidly into the realm of Thoroughly Unusable.

My Macbook Impressions: Two Weeks In

I’m typing this on my still relatively-new Macbook. As the title suggests, I’ve been in possession of this notebook for a grand total of two weeks, and below are some thoughts as to my experience so far. Keep in mind that before this, my use of Macs / OS-X has been minimal. Things that Mac users don’t necessarily notice stick out for me. I’m directly comparing the usability of this system to that of my main PC, in regard to both hardware and software.

Windows Se7en

I’m lazy, and I *just* posted about Apple, so this is just a block quote:

Windows Se7en. Like that mediocre action movie, Se7en. I didn't get it either.

“Windows 7, the much-anticipated successor to Microsoft’s Windows Vista OS, may arrive ahead of schedule. Although Microsoft has previously said that Windows 7 would not arrive until early 2010, new rumors surfaced Monday claiming that the company’s internal calendar puts the release date at

Google Chrome (it’s shiny)

Google has finally done it! They went and created a web browser, borrowing various elements from Opera, Safari, and Firefox to get there. It might sound like a bit of a frankenstein (or frankenstein’s monster, if you want to get technical), but I assure you, Google’s new browser, named Chrome, is anything but clunky.

Google Chrome

My First Computer Build

Maybe the title is a little misleading. While this is my first build, it isn’t really mine. I’m putting together a gaming rig for my friend Raymond, who has plenty of money available but not a ton of knowledge when it comes to computers. I’m by no means an expert, but I’ve upgraded computers quite a few times, throwing in new hard drives, memory, graphics/sound/wireless cards, etc. From time to time I’ve performed hard drive reformats, and I seem to have become 24-hour tech support for my family and friends. Raymond happens to be the most recent example, and I’m excited to challenge myself (and a little encouraged by how many people online state that “any idiot with a screwdriver and a how-to guide can build a computer”).