I don't like upgrading PCs

Yesterday, I was forced into upgrading our oldest desktop PC. For quite a while now, whenever we'd try to start it up, the boot process failed early and it would try to boot up from the floppy drive. I tried changing the CMOS battery but it didn't make a difference. The thing has been getting progressively worse. It used to only take a dozen or so startup attempts before it would recognize that there was a bootable hard drive and boot up. Lately it was getting to 20 and 30 tries. Yesterday, it exceeded those numbers and I finally decided to bite the bullet and do a motherboard upgrade.

In anticipation of having to do this, I had a case and power supply brought up some months ago. Because I've always found motherboard replacements to be so unpredictable in what happens to the operating system, I was holding off on this upgrade as long as I possibly could.

The hardware part of the upgrade was actually quite painless. The instructions for the case were pretty good, and the diagrams in the motherboard manuals were also quite good. I got everything hooked up, the CPU and heat sink installed, the video card installed, and was amazed that when powered up, the boot screen appeared. (I've had more than one instance in the past where the initial power-on did not succeed, for various reasons.)

Then the troubles started. I moved the hard drive from the old PC to the new. I also moved the CD-RW drive over. I booted the computer again, and Windows actually came up. It started encountering new hardware and asked for driver disks. Uh, oh... I had forgotten plug in the CD-RW power cable... I shut Windows down so I could plug it in...

That done I booted up -- and Windows almost started. Right before the login window, it popped up an error about the Registry having problems flushing its writes, etc. Ha! I've written error messages like that before in software I've worked on. It's one of those error messages that really says, "I haven't a clue what went wrong, but something did, and I can't continue," but in more technical terms. I searched the web for a solutions but couldn't find any. So I went to bed, annoyed and frustrated at being so close, yet so far.

This morning I started working on it again. This OS, being an upgrade from Windows ME many years ago (though the drive is only a few years old, having had to replace it at one point), the main file system was still FAT32. I'll get back to this in a little while.

I first tried a repair install of Windows XP, but I couldn't even use that option because the OS partition didn't have enough free space left. I then tried the Recovery Console to attempt to salvage the Registry files. That too, was not successful. I tried to install an upgrade of Windows Vista, but the upgrade I have requires the upgrade to be started from within Windows XP... Catch-22!

I'm sure I tried a few other things. Oh, and in the process of all this, Windows activation expired. Normally when major hardware changes are made, the OS gives you 3 days to re-activate. My mucking with trying to recover the Registry and such caused an immediate activation. I was not able to activate at startup because, as I later suspected, I have a web filtering program that requires sign-on before it allows Internet connectivity. If activation is required before applications start, but an application is needed before activation can access the Internet... Another Catch-22.

Throughout all this, Windows would occasionally boot up. That's how I encountered the immediate activation requirement. I finally used the phone to call in the activation, and that was successful. I still didn't have much hope for Windows to successfully boot up consistently.

But I decided, what the heck, I'll convert the FAT32 partitions to NTFS (because NTFS is more reliable) and see what happens. Of course that requires a restart. So I did that and went away to let the conversion happen.

After quite some time, Shelley informed me that something was happening on the PC. I looked and the restart worked and Windows was at the login screen. Well, maybe the darn thing is really working, I thought.

There were numerous updates that had to be applied, and some of them required restarts. And what do you know? The computer has been working now without error.

Adding up the time, I think I spent a good 7 hours on this upgrade. Which is why I was holding off on it, and which is why I don't like performing major computer surgery. And no, I still have no idea why it didn't work last night and it is working this afternoon.