u235

This is less of a rant and more of a grudge-ridden acceptance of reality. At the core of the matter is the little bit of sand and metal that runs so much of our lives - silicon. Silicon is the new gold - we need it, love it, depend on it, it runs so many aspects of our lives, our cars, our homes, hospitals, national defense, credit cards, gas stations... the list goes on and on. Gold still may be the unit that upholds our currency, but silicon is what runs our lives and keeps things in order. The thing is - unlike gold which is an inert metal (barring electrical contacts) silicon is a 'performing' element. We shape it into rectangles, mix it with exotic ingredients and voila - produce chips. But not all chips are created equal.

There are multiple grades of chips; worthless crap, shitty, Ok and damn good. More like toy grade, consumer grade, automotive grade and military grade if you want the real categories. The bins are allocated by the ability to perform in different ranges of temperature, and they categorize a chip by testing it. Yep, that's right one batch could suck and be consumer, the next could be military. But what happens when the chip is right on the edge? That's when someone is going to have a fucking hell of a time, kind of like I did the other night.

The goal was to build a new computer, pretty simple really once you pick all the compatible parts. A few screws here, a few connectors there, snap, snap, plug, plug, and poof - instant computer. We managed to assemble all the parts in maybe an hour or two at the most... but the fun came when trying to load up the OS. I say fun in a masochistic sense of course, but I'm sure you sensed that.

So lets jump into this little vignette. It's 8pm and the essential hardware is assembled, Motherboard, CPU, Video, CD/DVD drives, hard drives, even a floppy drive. It's wired, it's powered, it boots and... run through the bios without a hitch. It's a digital happyland, until we stick in the OS CD. The OS begins to load and... pukes up a big blue hairball. Nice. Let the debugging begin.

So if you're reasonably certain that you've assembled the hardware correctly (double and n-tuple checking in the process) and it seems to boot where do you start? Well if it's having trouble copying files to the hard drive then it must be the hard drives fault yes?

If you agreed with me you need to be bitch slapped like I was with a big, stanky, wet fish - a red herring to be exact. I spent hours tracking down leads on the bios, on the SATA interface, swapping in IDE drives, swapping them back out. We had 2 different OS CDs and they didn't react the same - which lead to further confusion and suspicion on the part of the innocent hard drive. One wouldn't load, the other would load but not copy files. Bios settings? Uh, where to start? So many inscrutable options, so many possibilities to screw things royally. The night went on and on in a blur of manufacturer FAQ's, forums and Google News Groups.

The next morning the digital heavens opened when it was discovered that the CD/RW drive was... partially defective. It wasn't broken enough to fail completely - but just enough to prevent the proper operation of any other device on the same bus AND faulty enough not to fully read material it was stuffed with. Once it was removed from the bus and the OS CD was put into the remaining drive things went back to business as usual, OS installed, drivers configured, things went without a hitch.

For the record the CD drive had ASUS branding. In the past I've bought Sony's and not seen any issue, but then again I have 5 - 8 year old CD drives by no-name manufacturers lying around that still work as well. Maybe you get what you pay for, the ASUS drive was cheaper than the other drives but then again since it was a partial failure all you can say what that the manufacturer didn't fully burn in the drive to test it.

I'd like to say I resent the time wasted by the crappy drive, but I really can't. Yes it's nice when everything works perfectly the first time, but while it was annoying it was also challenging and a test of endurance that I have to admit was enjoyable in some masochistic sense. In the end organic matter won over silicon, at least in this round.