DVD burner installed - FINALLY

[dreamshark]

I know there are people reading this that can install a computer drive in 20 minutes - 10 if you can remember where you left the screwdriver. I'm not one of those people. It took me 3 hours. Of course part of that time was absorbed by obsessive and repeated vacuuming. First I vacuum all around the computer, under the desk, the outside of the case, and the rest of the room while I'm at it so I won't be inhaling dust the whole time I'm crawling around down there. Then once I start removing pieces of the computer I keep finding more nests of dust bunnies and dragging the vacuum cleaner back out to suck them up. Oy. You innocents who have never opened your computer case have no idea how much dust lives inside it. It's disGUSTing.

But the main reason it takes so long is because it is so damned hard to open the case on my 'puter. Have you ever played one of those computer games where all the folks who live in the deserted town you are exploring thought it would be cool to secure their doors with elaborate puzzles instead of locks? Well, those people do exist. They design Alienware computers. Here's what you have to do to get the side off the case. Remove two knurled thumbscrews and 2 phillips head screws from the back. Press on Hidden Access Point #1 to pop open a secret door in the side panel (they are very proud of their Hidden Access Points. Keeps evil-doers from Messing With Your Stuff). Unlock the key lock inside the security panel (which I leave unlocked, due to the notable lack of people in my household that are just itching to get inside my computer and Mess With My Stuff). Slide the spring-loaded slidey thing towards the front of the computer while simultaneously pulling the back of the side panel free of the back catches. Reach under the bottom of the side panel and lift it up and sort of forward at the same time to free it from the other catches. Reach through the opening and carefully uncable the power-supply from the cool lighted alien head logo in the side panel. Done! The side panel is off!

Now the rest should be trivial. Slide the drive into the drive bay, connect the power supply and the ribbon cable to the obvious connectors on the drive and that's it. This would indeed be easy if the obsessive neatniks who assembled this computer hadn't carefully bundled up all the extra power cable connectors with dozens of little black cable ties and then shoved them down the back of the computer behind the cage that holds the drives. Since I couldn't figure out how to get the top or front panels off, I had to partially remove the cage holding the floppy drive so I could fish around behind it for power cables. Finally retrieved one, installed the drive, and put everything back together. Miraculously, it works! Anyway, I can see the new drive and successfully play CDs from it.

Now if I can just figure out this huge wad of software that came with it, I can proceed with the original plan, which was to back up my iTunes library and photos on DVD so I can clean some of the files off my C drive before it explodes. Poor little C-drive. Only 80 Gigabytes. I never imagined it would be FULL. [insert your own story of how tiny your first hard drive was compared to today's behemoths, which I will attempt to top by harking back to the days of vintage mainframe computers with rotating drums the size of cement mixers that held less data than a thumb drive ...]

Comments

[ckd]

When I started at my current job (early 1999), the main file server had, in each of two half-height racks, about as much space as in my current iPod (and, combined, less than half of what I bought for $400 at Best Buy last month).

At the supercomputing conference I went to last week, one of the vendor giveaways was a 1GB USB flash drive bracelet. The first 1GB drive I bought for a system I was running was a full height 5.25" drive that cost upwards of $2500 (more than the conference registration, plane fare, meals, and hotel cost for 5 nights).

[mmagidow.livejournal.com]

And have you ever considered technical writing as your next career? I love the way you 'splain things. Yes, my first supercomputer was 30 mbs, and the nice man who sold it to my company assured me that "this is the most computer you will need for years!" Of course, the kids were thrilled when that proved to be a slightly inaccurate prediction and we brought the dang thing home so they could play King's Quest III, or whatever. Them were the days.