3 posts tagged “computer”

I have now installed Window ME on THREE hard drives, two of which now reside inside my computer, and one in the E-machines 800mhz that allowed me to do this in the first place.

Ironically enough, whenever I boot into Windows on my computer [a Hewlett Packard], I get a splash screen saying: "Windows ME. Copyright 1999. Distributed by E-machines," and the hard drive that now resides in the E-machines was made by HP (also ironic--this is the one that came with my computer in the first place).

Now for the next challenge: Networking them together.

Windows has decided that a year is long enough punishment. Last night, on a whim, I tried to use the Windows NT recovery CD again, this time making sure that the Hard drive was completely clean. And what happens? It WORKS. How, I don't know, but for some reason or other, Windows is back and occupying only two gigs on the hard drive. (I think I turned off the support for big hard drives [apparently NT 4 was written when 2 gigs was considered huge]).

Square A1, Linux's move.

It all started when my grandfather gave me a computer for my birthday. The hard drive did not work, but hey, he threw in a new 200 gig for free. Sweet. There was a catch, though. It only came with one working version of Windows: NT 4.0, which is a dedicated workstation operating system. No Solitaire. : ( So I decided to remedy the situation by installing the heavily outdated Mandrake Linux 10.0. No problem for one starting his debut into the world of nerddom. But there was a problem. I forgot to allow Windows to stay, and it was completely wiped from the hard drive. Oops. So I thought to myself, well, there is always the recovery CD. NOT! Windows decided to thank my deplorable lack of hospitality by refusing to come back.

So there I was, with a with a Pentium 4, 200 gig hard drive, 1 gig RAM, double CD drive, potentially double monitor computer, but stuck with nothing to run on it but either Mandrake Linux 10 or Red Hat 7, neither of which even came close to taking full advantage of my computers modest capabilities. Fortunately, I had just enough money to buy one of the best investments of my life: SuSE Linux 10.0.

  The chameleon appealed to me, but more importantly, it could do anything I wanted it to do, except run Windows only applications. But oh well. I was, for the most part, content.

Until recently. One thing that got me started was that I found a pretty good Graphics Card (an nVidia 5200, if you must know) in our Communal Electronics Stockpile. With this, I would be able to run my dream Killer App: Orbiter.

Orbiter is a free spaceflight simulator which strives to be the most realistic simulator out there. But unfortunately, it only runs on WINDOWS. Oh the frustration! Then I got it in my head that I could use the Hard Drive from another computer that had windows installed, put it into my computer, and go through a complex process of copying the Windows content from the foreign hard drive to the native one. Complex, yes, but made up of simple steps that I had done literally hundreds of times. I began the process a week ago, and only today have I figured out how to make all the little "simple" steps come together properly. But Hey! It Worked! I now have a computer that runs both SuSE Linux 10 and Windows Me!