holiday - dad pc

So after the wedding I had two basic tasks for the rest of my holiday.

Firstly, I had to clear down my PVR a bit.  The PVR had basically gotten to 90% full, and given the last part of the holiday was going to be away from home I needed to clear it down or it would run out of space.

I did okay with this - I cleared off about 40% off, taking it down to 50% full.  If I’d been off the whole week I’d have taken it down further.  And if I hadn’t had the other task to do I would have made more progress too I think.

The other task was my Dad’s PC.

As mentioned before the holiday I made some poor decisions with the money he’d paid for it so I ended up having to split the purchases across multiple cards.  This was particularly annoying since I therefore had to pay multiple postage for everything that was then delivered at exactly the same time in the same van!

In the end I bought the full spec stuff I’d said I would (I could have gone cheaper) with two exceptions: I didn’t buy a separate CPU cooler and I only bought 16gb of the 32gb of RAM.

Both of these would be virtually undetectable to him, though I did own up, although I didn’t give the proper reason that I’d fucked up.  Instead I said I’d forgotten about the cooler and would get it later and that the RAM had been faulty so I’d had to return it.

I will get both of these, but it will be later when I have some money - probably for when I next see him, which will likely by in October or so.

Building the PC took me about a day all told.

I then went down to my Dad’s on Thursday, getting there in the early evening.  I therefore started the installation process on the Friday.  Well, there was a bit of an issue we had to fix first.

See, I was hoping we could re-use his DVD drive, which isn’t that old.  I’d expected the motherboard would have both connection types (SATA and I forget what the older one is called).  Unfortunately, the board only had SATA and it turned out his drive only had the older one.  We therefore popped to PC World and got a new drive (it was about £30 - probably the same as buying online, taking postage into account).  However, we also had to get a new keyboard, as it turned out the keyboard he had was PS/2 only - I’d guessed/assumed it was USB with an adapter, but it was just PS/2.

There was a bit of a cock up there as he actually had a USB mouse, but kinda forgot - I’d assumed it was part of the same thing (it’s wireless and the receiver was both and it used to be, but apparently he’d gotten a new mouse that was USB, but it was the same make - all very complicated).

Anyway, that afternoon I started and basically installed Windows7 plus all the millions of updates.

The Saturday I installed all the separate applications and the hardware, etc.  My dad was a bit of a pain on this day - it was weird actually, as if he wasn’t expecting it to take so long and was making a fuss to get my attention like a child whose parents are too busy so they start misbehaving to get attention.  He kept getting in the way and of course, ironically, that meant it took longer.

Anyway, Sunday we put the desk and all the bits back away and I gave him a quick tour of the machine.  He seemed pleased, particularly with the speed.  With the old machine he used to turn it on then take the dog for a walk and it would just be ready to log on when he got back.  Then he’d make a pot of tea while it logged on and was ready for him to actually do anything.

The new one you press power on and 10 seconds later (5 of which are the POST checks) it’s ready for you to log on.