The Wonderful World of Upgrading Your PC.

Published on 26 February 2003 in ,

A few weeks ago, I realised that my two year old 20Gb hard drive was looking just a little full.

Back in the heavy days of September 2000, 20Gb sounded so much, just as 170Meg sounded a lot when I got my very first PC in the early 1990s.

Deciding to splash out, I ordered an 80Gb Seagate Barracuda drive – a drive which I now know to make a rather pleasing burble noise when it powers up. Had I known that at the beginning, I wouldn’t even have considered any other brand.

The drive itself is purring along at this very minute, holding a whopping 650Meg of files that I’m burning to a CD, but it wasn’t like this last night when I tried to install it.

Isn’t Installing Fun?

I’m no PC novice, and have spent some time upgrading computers over the years – at one point I even built a PC from scratch, although I used the case from my first ever PC. That same machine currently sits in my parents home some 6 years later.

So with all this ‘experience’, why is upgrading a PC a forever puzzling and bemusing experience?

For example, last night I plugged the new hard drive in pretty much as it is in now. But it wouldn’t work with my existing hard drive. Hours of messing and experimenting and it still didn’t work. Using either hard drive by themselves worked fine.

Indeed this evening I went through the same process of randomly moving cables around, switching jumpers, wobbling, yanking. And suddenly out of the blue, for no apparent reason, eureka!

Out of the Blue.

Why it suddenly started working I simply have no idea. What I have done is nothing special, nor out of the ordinary. But for some random reason, it all came together.

It’s not the first time this has happened to me. Indeed it’s the same thing virtually every time I do anything to any PC.

Now I know PCs are rather complex pieces of equipment, but it really would be nice just to plug something in and have it work straight away. But then maybe that would take all the fun out of it.