Behind the Wall

I had to bite the bullet...

Somehow, on Friday, my PC at home started to act funky. Everything on the desktop would disappear and then reappear. After rebooting, it would do this, and then just finally disappear. It wouldn't give me enough time to do anything, whether it was to start a virus scan, do a system restore, or anything. Somehow a trojan was stealthy enough to evade my AV and FW, which were both active. I had heard of one that was out there that was crafty enough to do just that.
So I figured I would just do what I had planned on doing before (installing a new hard drive), but with a new twist -- make the new drive the primary and reinstall the OS.

Well, the only catch was that I didn't have the restore CD for XP Media Center Edition anymore. So I went in search of an install package for it. Lo and behold, no vendor out there had a copy. (I'm talking Staples, Circuit City, Best Buy, etc.) I obtained the 500GB internal hard drive, no worries... but I had to bite the bullet and upgrade far ahead of schedule to Vista Home Premium.


So far, it's not bad at all. No software compatibilty issues as yet.

The only thing is -- the SATA cable that came with the new drive isn't one that fits flush on the drive, and the cradle that the drive sits in makes it impossible to use, as the drive end has an extra part that fits into the indentation next to the data pins. So I went back out and got another cable, didn't even think to see if it fit flush. When I closed the case, it ended up bending the pins a little and breaking off the plastic bit that the pins rest against. After a little bit of manipulation, I got the drive working, but it won't rest in the cradle that Dell uses to hold hard drives inside the tower. Oh well, I'll manage something.

The old drive will eventually be wiped of data, after I get all the old docs and such off of it, and be used as a backup/extra drive.