Upgrading PCs, the woes of IT…

In light of recent issues with her old machine it was finally time to replace the wife’s machine. It’s been an ongoing issue, we knew it had to be done, but it seemed like all the newer PCs that were available were lesser machines than my main machine that I bought a few years back, but at the same price! I’m talking about a 500 euro desktop… I was hoping to find something a bit lower price as she doesn’t need that much horsepower, just something a little more stable.

The bottom line on the old machine seems to be that the harddrive was getting tired, combined with Windows XP that had been rehomed a few times from harddisk to harddisk, finally got corrupted to the point it just stopped booting. In the past her machine has usually been the leftover bits left after I upgrade, explaining some wear and tear on her hardware before she used it.

So off to PC City (Shitty) on Friday to take advantage of their going out of business sale, 25% off nearly everything… We first found a Medion with dual core Intel chip for 360 euros, (270 after discount) which seemed fine… until you realize it had no PCI slot, no front ports (but a fancy media door  with nothing behind it!) we ended up reselling that to the inlaws who needed a generic machine to replace an ailing WinXP machine they have. Back to PC Shitty on Monday… seems like about 3/4 of what they had on Friday is now gone, found an HP Athlon II X2 for 399 (299 with discount) that definitely had a PCI slot, as I checked on my Android phone before we bought it.

Here we are a few days later (this work week ended) finally putting some time into getting it configured and what not. Email and browser all migrated, office installed, a bazillion updates for Win7 and office… next big items are install the Soundblaster LIVE! with Live Drive II and our faithful HP Laserjet 1000. No dice. Seems both are not supported in Windows 7. Not to mention the new power supply has no floppy or IDE style power connectors (so swap with her old one) for the LIVE bay…

Realized I had an unused Creative Audigy 2 ZS recovered from a retired machine I acquired. That seems to be supported, but it also seems to be a real shame to lose the LIVE bay… ah well… would have been nice of Creative to at least put a standard connector on it to take advantage of the existing in case front audio ports… but I guess they would rather have me spend 140 euros on a new X-Fi with front bay… yeah, not happening.

Still no solution for the printer… I did have it working on my ubuntu setup for a while… but Win 7 still won’t work with it even as a networked printer… Just writing this as I wait on the files to transfer across off the old IDE disks now housed in external USB enclosures… seems a waste to retire a couple 500GB harddisks, but none of our machines have IDE interfaces after this last round of upgrades… must look into ide2sata adapters…