I Never Learn
Sunday Afternoon
NOON: “I think I will upgrade the computers! I’ve got some more RAM here for mine, and I should switch the hard drives between the two computers so that the one that’s plugged into the stereo has the good sound card.”
2PM: “Man, moving all these drives around sure is a pain! But I’m sure it will be worth it, and that it won’t go catastrophically wrong like every other time I try this kind of thing.”
4PM: “There we go! Annie’s hard drive in my old case, it working perfectly! Now to fix up my hard drives in her newer case.”
6PM: “Was there anything important on my hard drive? Why didn’t I make a backup?”
8PM: “Man, this sucks! I’ve never even SEEN this error screen before! I have no idea what’s gone wrong or how to fix it!”
10PM: “AGAAAAAAGH HATE HATE HATE”
MIDNIGHT: My computer is lying in a pile of components and wires, awaiting the magical solution that will solve the horrible new BSOD error I’m getting, and I’m installing Mozilla on Annie’s computer so I can still work tomorrow.
10AM: Nothing has changed overnight, no magical solution has presented itself, and I’m getting worried that the best possible result I can get from all this is to just try to put things back the way they were, and if I’m lucky, all I will have to do is reinstall Windows on my computer without having to format (thus losing data that isn’t backed up).
I'm a 30-year-old 
“I should switch the hard drives between the two computers so that the one that’s plugged into the stereo has the good sound card.”
How does this make sense?
June 10th, 2002 at 2:07 pm
Well, there’s a couple of things factoring into this.
1) Annie’s hardware (motherboard, processor, case) are newer and slightly faster than mine, so I am desirous of them.
2) My computer has sound through a really crummy on-board sound card. However, I’ve never been able to get a good sound card to function (some sort of incompatability with my motherboard, I’m sure you remember me ranting about this last year).
3) Due to the way the house is laid out, only a computer in my office can be plugged into the stereo.
So, given that I want a computer with a good sound card (meaning not mine) plugged into the stereo, but that I don’t want to trade offices with Annie, and factoring the fact that I wanted her setup anyways, it seemed logical to just swap the hard drives in our computers, so Annie would end up with my slighly slower setup, and I would get the slightly faster one with the sound card.
This whole plan fell apart when Annie’s motherboard developed some kind of fatal error that prevents it from interacting with my hard drives. I’m hoping to switch everything back tonight without too much trouble.
So to answer your question, given the amount of effort I had to put into gaining this teeny tiny little benefit, what I did didn’t make any sense at all, which is why I titled my post “I Never Learn.” :)
June 10th, 2002 at 3:25 pm
So, really what you’re telling us is that you tried to steal your girlfriend’s computer and it backfired. Serves you right.
June 10th, 2002 at 6:49 pm
personly, i think that annie just removed a jumper or two while he wasn’t looking. she’ll put it back if he gives her the faster computer again.
June 10th, 2002 at 7:01 pm
i couldn’t tell from your description, but it sounds like you’re getting the good old “inaccessible boot device” error from windows 2000/xp, which occurs when you attempt to boot up a 2k/xp system on a motherboard which requires a different HAL than that which it was originally stored on.
nothing you can do about it other than re-install 2k/xp over the top. your data will be fine.
if it’s some other system/error.. then I wish you luck.
-h
June 12th, 2002 at 12:49 am
I want to point a finger and laugh. But I know better. It’d bite me in the ass the next time I tried to put in a floppy disk or something.
“Drive A: error. Formatting C:”
What?!
June 12th, 2002 at 10:20 am
I’m with KT.
I bet Annie didn’t want the slower computer, and so karmically you lose.
It’s sort of like if I try to make my computer do something other than crash . . . I’m fighting against a force of nature.
June 12th, 2002 at 11:07 pm