The Upgrade Chronicles, Part 4

Well I only thought it was over. So my PC threw a STOP error, this time an “infinite loop” error, something to do with the GeForce3 card. I’ve heard of these but never ran into it before. Not a huge deal, since as luck would have it NVIDIA released new drivers today. Rebooted, reinstalled, rebooted, got back to work. Then while in Neverwinter Nights the system locked up. Rebooted, then when I got back in I got another STOP related to IRQ’s or somesuch. So if I wasn’t convinced I needed to reformat/reinstall XP I was at this point. Of course, once I rebooted again, my BIOS gave me a SMART error. SMART is (apparently) a dealie on hard drives where they can signal when they think they’re going to fail. I Google’d this and the consesnus is: this isn’t a drill. This hard drive really is going to die very soon. Given that it’s a 4+ year old 6GB drive, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

In any event, my wife has a second 40GB hard drive that we bought so we could mirror her hard drive but we never got around to it. Given that I do all the ViaTexas work on my system it makes it a better candidate for this idea anyway so tomorrow I’m steaing my wife’s hard drive.

And yet for some reason, despite the fact that it’s going to work out fine and I was going to reformat anyway, this whole thing has pissed me off. Not sure why, maybe because of the series of events leading up to this don’t exactly inspire confidence.