Just when I thought things were going nice and smoothly…more irritation.

Today was actually a very good day. Aside from one woman stuggling with AOL, I didn’t have to deal with any frustrations at all. I kept very busy today doing useful and productive work. Nothing self-destructed at my touch, nothing stubbornly refused to work, and nothing took far longer than it should have. Plus, the replacement parts for my son’s PC showed up yesterday, and I finally had a chance to work on his machine tonight.

The video card on his old machine overheated and died horribly when its fan stopped spinning, and unfortunately it took his motherboard down as well. So, I ordered him a nice new motherboard and video card. They arrived yesterday, and I assembled his PC earlier tonight. Everything went together without a hitch. Well, without any major problems. Ultimately I wound up with his primary HDD set as slave instead of master, and his FDD cable plugged in backwards… (Why do they bother to key the cable if the connector itself is designed so that you can plug it in either way? I’ve yet to see a single FDD where it was truly obvious which way the cable should be connected.) …but both those problems were very quickly solved. The machine POSTed just fine and I kicked off an install of Windows XP Professional. That is when the trouble started.

The installation ran off the CD just fine, reformatted the HDD, copied some files over, rebooted, and then hung. It just simply stopped responding. I was stuck there looking at a pale blue screen with a dead mouse cursor sitting right in the middle - completely unresponsive. I rebooted to see if it would happen again…this time it actually booted all the way into the installation screen, but it froze again before too long. Another reboot, and this time I got a genuine BSOD. I haven’t seen a BSOD in Windows XP in ages. And of course the error message was considerably less than helpful… All it said was IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL.

I tried booting the machine with just 1 stick of RAM installed, and it dropped me to a BSOD almost instantly with the 512 MB stick installed. The 256 MB stick kept the machine running ok, no BSOD, but it kept freezing up during the install process. So, I swapped out the CPU as well. This time it seemed to run ok. I was able to complete the install of Windows XP and get his machine up and running again. What I don’t know, yet, is whether that 512 MB stick of RAM is good or not…or if it was just a dead CPU causing problems…

This last week has been frustrating in many respects. At work, things just seem to keep going wrong. The last two site visits I’ve gone on have turned out to be far longer and more involved than was expected. I spent an extra 3 hours on-site on Thursday last week, and 2 hours on-site yesterday. And it neither of those were due to any single particularly difficult issue, but instead the people I was working with just kept coming up with more and more trivial little issues for me to fix.

We’ve also got a couple machines back at the shop that are stubbornly refusing to work, and I’ve had the misfortune to get stuck with both of them. One is an ULTRA that has started freezing up intermittently. We can’t seem to isolate the problem, so we’ve been replacing parts at random and hoping they fix it…so far, they haven’t.

Then there’s the Compaq laptop that I managed to kill. It was done and ready to go home. One of my co-workers had don all the work on it, it had been through QA and was all set to leave the shop. Then the owner decided that they wanted us to throw some antiviral software on it, and I made the mistake of trying to install it. I did very little to that machine… I simply put the CD in the drive and powered it up… But when it had booted up, it refused to read the disc. I tried several other discs, and it wouldn’t read any of them. I tried to reboot the machine and got an error message - “explorer.exe” is missing. I’ve been working on that laptop since Wednesday last week, and it still isn’t working right. I can’t get it to read from a CD consistently, and I have no idea why. I still haven’t been able to install the antivirus either. And nobody else wants to take a look at it…I’ve asked for help several times, and they’ll just glance at the machine and then walk away after pushing a button or two.

My frustrations aren’t limited to work, either. At home, I’ve been trying to get a Gentoo install up and running on a VM. I’ve never used Gentoo, and I’d really like to see how it runs before I actually devote a machine to it. Gentoo’s install is a lot more involved than what I’m used to from SuSe and RedHat - rather than simply clicking the “Install” button and walking away, you have to build much of the install yourself. This is fine, and I’ve been using their terrific handbook to get everything set up…but somewhere along the line I’ve made a mistake. Last night I finally finished (or so I thought) with the install process…rebooted the thing…and GRUB told me that (hd0,0) was not a valid root device. Now, I’ve been working on this install on & off over the last week or so…I’ve had to stop what I was doing several times to take care of various things…and at this point in time I couldn’t even begin to tell you where I went wrong. Sure, I suppose it is safe to assume the problem is somewhere in grub.conf…but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find it somewhere else. I’m going to have to wait until I’ve got a solid block of free time to try and fix this.

WoW, generally a refuge from frustration and a good way to waste some time, has been causing frustrations itself lately. The huge content patch went in last week, and there has been plenty of downtime lately. I wasn’t able to log in or play WoW at all last night.

Had a terrific time hunting out in Silithus tonight. I finally got around to following through on a quest that I’ve had for a few days now… Initially they sent me to Darnassus, where I talked to a very unpleasant Arch Druid. He relayed me on to one of his underlings, who then sent me along to Moonglade to talk with someone important. That person gave me a letter of introduction, and sent me to talk with someone out in Silithus. When I eventually arrived in Silithus I was given a great task - explore some Night Elf ruins that have been overrun with silithid and ghosts. Yay!

I had to kill off a number of these Night Elf ghosts…but they’d scream when they died, which stirred up the local silithid. Each time we killed a ghost we’d have to kill a couple silithid as well. Eventually we killed all the ghosts we needed, and reported back to our contact…who had a new task waiting for us.

This time he wanted us to climb up to the top of a silithid-infested tower and see what happened when we intentionally stirred up the hive. That’s right, he wanted us to intentionally see just how angry we could make the silithid. As soon as we set foot in the tower we were jumped by three silithid. It wouldn’t have been that hard a fight, but we got a couple ghost adds as well. The end result was a very challenging battle that we just barely lived through. Then we climbed to the top of the tower and tried to cause some trouble. There was a blobby looking thing that was clickable, so we clicked on it, and immediately got swarmed with tons of silithid. For every one we killed, another two took its place. We managed to kill quite a few before running back to town…only to find out that we hadn’t completed the quest.

I’ve been trying, on and off, for the last week or so to get a decent Linux distro up and running on my machine. I installed Microsoft Virtual PC a couple weeks ago, and my first thought was to try installing Linux on it. I used to have lots of fun running Linux on a spare PC here at home.

My first attempt was with SuSe Linux…which I quickly discovered is now owned by Novell, and no longer the distro I knew and loved. Don’t get me wrong, there isn’t anything inherently wrong with Novell or a Novell-owned Linux distro…but it just didn’t have the same feel to it anymore.

I decided to install Gnome, since I’d always preferred it to the K Desktop Environment which is now the default in SuSe. I went looking for Ximian’s site, because they used to produce a very comprehensive Gnome desktop. They, too, have been bought up by Novell; and are no longer quite the same beast.

My next attempt was Red Hat, which did not go terribly smoothly. I figured that Fedora Core 3 would be more stable than 4, and tried to install that first. I tried to download a DVD image…but Virtual PC wouldn’t load the image, it just kept complaining that this .iso was far larger than the 700 MB or so allowed for a CD-ROM image. And there was no way to get it to recognize the fact that it was a DVD-ROM image. So, I downloaded a series of four CD-ROM images and installed from those. It installed just fine, but getting it to boot is another thing entirely. It keeps complaining that various things are restarting too quickly. So, I am currently in the process of downloading a bunch of Fedora Core 4 images, in the vague hopes that they might actually boot.

Didn’t really get to see much of the new WoW patch yesterday… The servers weren’t up and stable until somewhere around 7:30 or 8:00 last night. What I did see, however, looked quite promising. Just about every level 60 in the guild was running through Dire Maul last night, and it sounded like they were having a great time. The chat bubbles, while looking slightly out of place in WoW, are actually quite effective. And the extra button bars are impressive, to say the least. Actually, I think “overkill” might be a better word for it. You can add up to four more bars, with 12 buttons on each bar…that’s 48 more buttons, in addition to the original 12…a grand total of 60 buttons on-screen at one time. Frankly, I don’t think my Warlock even has 60 unique skills/spells/powers.

We rented something called Ghouls over the weekend, and just got around to watching it last night. We only saw the first 15 minutes or so of it, before turning the thing off in disgust. I’ve suffered through enough horrible movies in the vague hopes that they’ll get better, I’ve learned my lesson. We turned that off after only 15 minutes and threw in another DVD from the weekend that also should have been horrible - Cube Zero - but which was surprisingly good.