I'm secretly a masochist?
Umm.. Not really. This box came from Hopelessly Pathetic with W7 Homely Edition on it. And about a gazillion gigglebikes of crapware. I bought my Beautiful Daughter a similar machine, only real difference is hers came with an interenal wireless card and Mrs. NoC's didn't. (Same mobo, same harddrive, both AMD quad cores, both 6 G memory..) I uprooted the same piles of crapware from both machines but for some reason, Mrs. NoC's machine has always been flakier than Beautiful Daughter's. Since the Systems Op here has to suffer whenever Windoze belches, he determined that the most stable approach would be to put a new HD in both machines and then install a more robust edition of Win7 to eliminate all the klingons from the Hoplessly Pathetic bloatware.
The upgrade on this machine got delayed by a recurring event that sometimes takes months to complete, and the last time this event wound down we were in the Christmas season.
NOW, I have until New Years to finish, because now there is no turning back. The events of this early AM have assured that. ;-)
I did learn something about this Chinese MoBo though.. even though the BIOS says the boot order points to the correct hard drive, if the other hard drive is also bootable, it allows BOTH FRIGGIN HARD DRIVES to try to boot. Simultaneously. With a lot of drive rattling. And no progress. Sort of like Washington DC... Not only do you need to specify the boot order, you need to also disable booting from the nonspecified device. I'm sure that's what those chicken-scratch-like letters say in the Chinese equivalent of "The Fine Print" at the bottom of the page that no one reads..
Anyway.. Now that I seem to have that crisis settled, and it seems to be booting correctly now with both drives active (but one boot-disabled), I think I will hit the sack. I'm sure that by the time I awaken (sometime this afternoon now) Mrs. NoC will have a list of gripes for the SysOp to correct..
And you know something else? Her keyboard sucks... I suppose the SysOp will be getting a request for another keyboard.. Just as soon as this machine seems to no longer be prone to Burping Quad-colored Microsoft Flags...
If the SysOp looses the requisition for about sis months, maybe it can be a birfbay precident. :-)
'G'night this morning. Or whatever it is over there.
Did wonder about that...Put the idea down to my deranged imagination.
Sleep well NoC, you've earned it!