Operational At Last

My new computer is finally operational and on-line.

I've never seen a modular power supply before, so it wasn't a surprise when my best assembly efforts were for naught.

Will did his best to sort me out over a cell phone, sight unseen.

Steve and John tried to figure out what I'd done wrong by looking at photographs that I e-mailed, but the detail wasn't sufficient.

It took a breakfast with Matt and Karim to see what my problem was. I brought my non-functioning PC in the back of my car one Sunday, and the two of them opened it up and had at it when we were done eating. They quickly diagnosed where I'd gone wrong and gave me the key to sorting it out.

I had to order a couple more items: a fourth G-Skill DDR, to bring my total RAM to 8GB, and a 3.5" bay for my SSD so I could move it up in the case, right under the CD drive.

When I first powered it up, using the wireless keyboard that is attached to my old machine, I was helpless. No drivers were available for the wireless keyboard, so I picked up a wired keyboard for $19.

I fired it up this afternoon and installed the Windows 7 64-bit OS. After adding the drivers I was fully operational - except for my SSD. I can see it in the BIOS; I can even see it listed as a disk drive in my device manager. But Windows 7 only finds my hard drive, not the SSD. I have to sort that out. The hardware graphics acceleration is disabled as well; I think that's a BIOS setting.

But it's nice to finally have this machine on-line and operational. It took me a while, but I learned a lot. There's still a lot of work to do installing software and moving documents from my old machine.

But I have a great sense of satisfaction today.

My sincerest thanks to Will, Steve, John, Matt, and Karim for the inspiration, patience, and advice.