Hardware hell
Saturday, July 15th, 2000Well, I am in hardware hell again. My new PC has strange problems with Windows 2000 partitioning - the disk manager ate half my disk capacity and won’t tell me where it went!
I was prepared for that kind of stuff. But then I discovered that the floppy drive is defect…
It’s very difficult to fix low-level disk problems if you can’t boot from diskettes. Not impossible, since the CD-drive is still recognized… but scary. So, here we go again.
Update: Hardwarehell.com exists!
I try very hard to see this as a lesson. It’s easy to become very mad at everyone who doesn’t make things work for you… but that’s just not the way it works.
PC hardware was never very reliable - if anything it’s better now than it used to be. Years ago there was an entire Byte issue about crashing PC’s. One article compared mainframe and PC traditions. The conclusion: we have made every possible trade-off against reliability for years - so what’s the surprise?
Searching for that Byte article I found the next logical conclusion: Programming is unsafe at any speed. Actually it’s a plug for some kind of debugger - but I love this quote: “The mental energy of the programmer is the fuel that runs programming environments.”
Back in 1984 I bought my first PC - and predictably something went wrong. When I went back to the store the clerk looked at me and said something I have never forgotten: “You are not a hardware guy, are you?”
I felt slightly humiliated and pleased to be understood at the same time. He sure had my number: software is my drug. And now I need a fix, so it’s time to get to work. Yesterday I downloaded Partition Magic - all I need now is a new floppy drive.
from the “Well, if you are so smart, why ain’t you rich?”-department:
I met a non-technical friend today, who reminded me that four years ago I explained bandwith to him and said everyone would know about it in a year or two. This time I was enthusiastic about weblogs… we’ll see.
All I wanted was a cheap floppy drive for testing purposes, but I almost found hardware heaven - PX is a place that reminds me of William Gibson’s lyrical description of a Gomi no sensei (”Master of junk”). All the old-time corner shops selling PC’s are disappearing, but the real low-end market for old, cheap and/or used stuff will never disappear.
Hal worried about how many readers he had yesterday. We all do, of course. But why?
Garret thinks it has to do with compatibility and popularity - he started an interesting thread in Hal’s discussion group.
Aila just came home with 15 litres of handpicked strawberries! Now I must fix all this hardware nonsense so I can upload some pictures. Jesus… that’s a lot of strawberries!