Building the Better Horse & Carriage: Introduction

I'm waiting on the overwriting - the complete erasure of any and all binary data stored magnetically on a hard disk drive - of my coworker's computer's main drive. It is a ninety-minute process and the first step in upgrading him from Windows 98 Second Edition to Windows 2000. An irregular IT Tech made from serendipity, I welcome this as around the fifteenth time I've overhauled a computer system, one way or another. I've always been lucky enough not to fear computers - I grew up with them and, in fact, enjoy their capabilities quite a bit - but in the spring of 2001 I was given the task of replacing the innards of three work computers. They chugged along like steam engines in 1960, running on Pentium I processors and we were ready to pump them up to Pentium IIIs for many times greater processing speed.

What was necessary? Quite a lot. Before I was ordered to remake the trio, my experience with the inside of a computer was much like a layman in anatomy class: a whole lot of guts to be gawked at, few to be instantly recognized. Lots of small parts and ultimately, an intimidating sight. Upgrading the computers required a replacement of the motherboard and central processing unit - simple enough, but as anyone who has worked with computer software or hardware can confirm, nothing worked out as planned. Every single operation had unique difficulties, a few of them dogged.

In my lack of experience I had no idea how unstable a computer's operating system would become when major drivers like disk controllers, buses and bridges from the previous hardware scheme were suddenly disconnected from any physical function and beset by a slew of new drivers struggling to take their place as primary trains for data trafficking. One computer began reverting to an installation two times removed; another simply failed to start up. Miraculously, I managed to boot both up into network connectivity one last time before madly scraping every last bit of important data onto a safe computer. I then erased both disk drives - using the overwriting software I have now - and installed anew, repeating the process for the third unit.

Problems didn't stop there, of course. The hardware switch made nice, luckily, with the current power sources of all three computers (a luxury I didn't have when I recently upgraded a couple of computers to rip-roaring, energy-demanding Athlon XP screamers). Two of the three, however, saw to it that their 3 1/2" drives be fried to complete unusability; one went so far as to zap its CD-ROM drive and another frustrated me for a week with garbled, Space Invaders-like characters on the boot-up screen before it was determined that the motherboard itself was faulty. Intel obliged, and I was soon back to work.

But by the time I had raced through this silicon gauntlet, I had learned the geography and functions of every internal component. In the nearly ten projects since then - from modifications to units built from scratch - I've come a long way. An accidental tech, I now work to stay current, keeping my eye trained on PC Magazine's and ExtremeTech's reviews, and New Egg's prices. I'm not an expert and you could correctly say that I know well enough to be dangerous - but if hardware finagling were a game of Operation!, I'd do a fair job of keeping poor old Sam's nose from going red.

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