all right, you have all waited so patiently, time for the answer
living in Cornwall, there are only so many computer shops around to choose between. so, i went off for a nice 1 hour drive looking for PC World in Truro. i had never been there before, so i had to find it, which i did after only a small amount of getting lost
well, about 1.5 hours later i had found that they had a range of (i think) HP computers with white and REALLY flakey cases, where all the drives were hidden behind little flip down panels that were prone to falling off
so, after discounting those, and also all machines with NVIDIA graphics cards, i came down to one rather nice compaq computer
i thought compaq computers were really expensive, and not really what i was going to buy.
then i found one tiny catch with this computer *sigh*
it was the last one, and when they went to see if i could buy the display model, they had lost all of the paperwork and disks, making it unsellable.
considering i had reached the point where i had gone out to get a new working computer come hell or high water, this wasnt good.
so, i got some directions to PC World in Plymouth (its on the main road, 3rd exit, if you see it you have passed it).
well, Plymouth is about 1 hour the other side of where i live if the trafic is ok, and there are no hold ups. marsheling my bloddy mindedness and total computer frustation (and trying to igrore the onset of a major cold) i set off.
about 1.5 hours later, i find a police man in the middle of the road redirecting trafic since the road ahead was closed
so, this prompted a nice half hour drive through some country lanes barely wide enough for my car, where i met lots of oncomming traffic, while i tried to find my way back to the main road.
when i finally got to Plymouth, i got quite lost looking for PC World. the turning i was told to use took me to a 6 exit, 4 lane round about with several sets of trafic lights on it, plus extra lights for getting on it!
after a nice drive around the centre of Plymouth (a first
) and passing the football ground i ended up back where i started
well, by now i just decided to carry on anyway. i mean, i had come this far. another half hour later i did finally find PC World
they had a much better selection than Truro, being a larger (and harder to find) store. they had a really nice Advent, but it was to expensive, being a really powerful machine!
so, i was all set to buy a really nice 3gig Pentium compaq machine, but it was out of stock
i checked out the various options for ordering, etc, but they werent encouraging.
so, dragging the salesman around the shop, i checked out the other options. at last i found a machine that did what i wanted! but, it had no port for connecting my joystick! in fact, none of the machines i had looked at had one, so i had to get a sound card fitted in order to use my joystick
well, the fun wasnt over yet. i selected a lovely compaq Presario, AMD XP 3000+, 512 meg RAM, 120 gig HD, ATI Radeon 9200 128meg graphics card
threatening to buy this gets the shop to run off and fit the sound card for me (which was nice of them). so, there i am, sitting and waiting while they do this, and they are locking up the shop around me! it has been a long day so far. then the technician appears and explains that the machine doesnt actually boot, since the OS is missing a file, and will need to be repared before it will boot. on a different day, i might have cared, but i just didnt at this point.
anyway, i was going to format and install a win98 / winXP pro dual boot when i got the machine home anyway.
when i finally got home (after a 8 hour day) i set about cleaning the HD, and doing the dual boot. then i ran into one more tiny problem...
the standard win98 boot floppy is, frankly, a joke! no format command, and if it doesnt recognise a valid C drive, it creates a ram disk called C drive!
well, after 2 hours of trying to make win98 install how i wanted, i gave up. i did get it installing in the end, when it started complaining that it couldnt copy files from the CD!
i only wanted win98 for experimenting and 2 games, and i decided it wasnt worth the pain. so i just stuck winXP pro on instead
now all i need to do is work out what motherboard drivers i need. the compaq website seems unable to tell me this *sigh*
