The Last Candle

Downgrade 2008 is nearly complete. The process has only taken about…three days.

Needless, this has been quite the G-D mess. Here’s the dish.

As of last Monday, two days I found my main PC dead and one day after deciding on “downgrading” to replacement hardware, Downgrade ‘08 wasn’t looking so good. The search through the usual hardware outlets revealed that the only available new replacement for a Socket-939 board was a Foxconn board. Not having any affinity for a second-tier brand of manufacturer, Downgrade ‘08 was upgraded: after two days of teeth-gnashing and bank-account-balance checking, I decided to buy a modern-generation motherboard, with matching processor and RAM modules. Downgrade ‘08 had become Upgrade ‘08.

Instead of the usual in-depth analysis of the current hardware market, an endeavor to eek out the best price-performance components that I used to do whenever an upgrade was imminent, I took a huge shortcut and basically stuck with Ars Technica’s Value Gaming Box suggestions.

The parts arrived on Friday and included a new hard drive (the current drive is running out of space — need more space!) and a new power supply (hey, if the power supply goes bad, that failure has the potential to ruin every other component, so another $50 for a new part is a sound investment).

With the arrival of new parts comes the lovely evening spent putting the big unwieldy puzzle together, which became my Friday night, which was preluded by an afternoon of dusting. At 8:30 EST, the rebuild began: everything old was pulled out, and everything new — CPU! Socket 775 mainboard! RAM modules, surrounded by electric-blue heatsinks! Hard drive! Power supply! — was loaded into the case. I plugged the new rig into a monitor and punched the power button to boot the system. The improvement over the old machine — which didn’t power up at all — was immediate, as the various fans in the system (including the incredibly-loud GPU fan) whizzed to life. And then…

No POST. That is, the power-on self-test wasn’t running, a test that concludes in some kind of beep code denoting the status of the boot-up process. Without a monitor attached (a “headless” setup), the beep code is an indicator of the progress of the booting process. A single beep usually means that the boot was successful, where different series and durations of beeps could signify, for example, a primary memory or video card issue.

In my machine’s case, no beeps were emitted, which is a sign that the machine was non-operational. Friday night: not a good night for computin’.

Saturday morning brought a recovery: after I pulled all components out of the case, including reseating the CPU, enacting a sort of reversal of the previous night’s installation, the system did POST (and beep!) after completely removing all components, including the CPU from the socket, and loading everything back in again. Now it was all installing software — Vista was up first, a modern OS for the new modern hardware.

The new installation of Vista didn’t wait long to go awry: much like the video corruption I experienced with 3D-accelerated games under Windows XP, the Desktop Window Manager (or DWM), which draws the desktop interface via the GPU and is the prime mover for the Aero visual theme, exhibited the same corruption and hence a completely unusable interface.

Games run under XP would exhibit this corruption occasionally, which largely looked like a solid color overlaid by a cascade of oblique lines and jagged stairsteps. After a bit of desperate tweaking I discovered that the XP solution to the corruption was to minimize in the game’s window, revealing the Windows XP Desktop, which was fine, and then opening the game’s window again, which apparently was enough to resolve whatever ailment previously afflicted the renderer. Apparently the GPU just needed to be distracted a bit, after which it would go back to full-on, perfect rendering (and how).

Windows Vista’s DWM actively uses the GPU to render the environment all of the time. In other words, when the output is corrupt in Vista, there’s no simple solution like the Windows XP-context remedy: when the signal is bad in Vista — and the video signal is indeed bad in Vista for this machine, corrupt and jumbled and jagged on every boot-up without fail, just like the 3D-accelerated games under XP — the operating system is essentially useless outside of Safe Mode, which is severely crippled for the obvious reason of ensuring compatibility and system stability (the video corruption doesn’t appear in Safe Mode likely because of a generic VGA driver powering the output).

So Vista is causing all sorts of problems. Fine, I thought, I’ll go back to Windows XP, which at least has a history of stability.

Windows XP wouldn’t even complete the installation: after the initial loading of system files, the operating system threw an “Error Loading Operating System” error when trying to boot; this exception is apparently caused by a BIOS that can’t handle the size of the disk. Seeing as how Vista loaded up without complaints, I’m more inclined to believe that Windows XP itself has a problem with the drive capacity (which, by the way, is a modest 20 GB for the system partition).

Windows XP won’t boot at all. Vista throws out garbage and is unusable. A Windows 2000 disc is around here somewhere, but I’d rather not turn this debacle from Upgrade 2008 into Sad Regression 2008. If I can’t get the new hard disk working as a system drive, I’ll backup and format the “old” (and still very capable) IDE disk with intent to employ it as the system disk. The new SATA drive will be used for everything else, which would be a heck of a lot of everything else.

Sigh. At least the MacBook Pro is working wonderfully.