It would almost be worth the cooking, cleaning and washing skid-marked undies to have a man (who likes fiddling with computer innards) in residence right now.

As those of you who know me would know, unscrewing the cover of my PC and fondling its innards is not my favourite passtime and today has been no exception.

In order to prepare my new linux box, I’ve had to open my old linux box and pilfer the hard drive (so we can get my website and stuff off it) and network card and my new windows box to pilfer my second slave hard drive (120 gigs of new primary hard drive goodness) and install all 3 items into the new.

The pilfering was a piece of cake. The installation however, has been hell.

Manouvering 2 hard drives into the hard drive chassis, with RAM sticks and video cards in the way was HELL. So HELL in fact, that I thought about pulling out the video card and RAM and attempted it, but I just could not get the video card out (short of using a pair of pliers, but that wouldn’t have been a good idea!)

So, I had to unscrew the whole hard drive chassis and drop it down to do it, after a few expletive-ridden attempts to force them in. I was extra careful when hooking the cables up (while the chassis was down), as I was thinking to myself, “When this is back in, there is NO WAY I want to be taking it all apart again because I f@cked up the cabling” and felt pretty smug and proud when after a lot of sweat (and more swearing), I got the last screw in.

The network card was easy.

Set it all back up and powered up.

Nothing on the screen and 2 short beeps, a bit of a space then another short beep from the computer.

I ring my computer God, Warren, who hmms for 2 whole seconds and says, “2 beeps? Sounds like RAM”. Seriously, this guy knows what any given number of damn beeps mean!

Both RAM and video card (which another set of beeps could signify) were right in the vortex of my scraping and prodding and pulling, so I could have toasted either.

Warren helpfully suggested that I take the RAM and video card out and re-seat them, just incase I loosened the connection, but thought the RAM was the issue. This is not good news, as the RAM is now conveniently located behind all the cabling mess for the hard drives. So, my friends, my answer to this is, I can live without my primary email until tomorrow, when, like childbirth, hopefully I can forget the pain of the day before.

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