Computer, Take II

After laptop woes (and win!), I was eying my tower for replacement as well. After a recent upgrade of something (not sure if it was Windows itself or some other software), the system basically crashed, barely running and taking an age even to boot. Yeah, a clean wipe of the drive would probably be all it really needs, but it is old, so this was a good a moment as any to upgrade.

Since I already had monitor and everything else I only needed a base system, and so went to a preassembled system from Paradigm PCs. Annoyingly, it was $100 less only a month or so ago, damn recession.

One small wrinkle. When they built the machine, the people putting it together either decided to save money or didn't care or something (a separate supplier to PP themselves), and didn't screw in the graphics card. Thus, when I got it, it was suffering a wee technical mishap known as "card fell out of the slot and was banging around the inside". Fine, I plugged it back in, and it runs, but then I had to use a screw from the case to fix it. And the computer says some graphics driver thing isn't installed properly, which I should take a look at, but as I said, it runs.

And from the lack of screws, I was able to deduce the existence of this, from pure logic. Neat!

This does mean that both my computers are now Vista :(, and I had to fight to get Windows Activation activated (took me a while to find the product number). I tried to find a new Activation key online, went for a wander through Microsoft's site, and others, gazed at cracks (didn't trust them), before finally seeing different sticker types and going "oh, I have one of those ones...". Surprised I couldn't find a place to give them money.

One embarrassing note: I got a new keyboard, a USB one because my PS2 one wasn't working. And when I plugged the new one in, I found out why. I hadn't actually plugged the PS2 keyboard in! (Thought I had, but too many damn plugs...)

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