Technology moves so fast/slow these days (delete as applicable)
Posted: November 24th, 2003 | 3 Comments »A Monday morning quiz for you: Which cutting-edge feature of my shiny new Gigabyte motherboard turned out to be utterly vital in order to install Windows XP onto my (also shiny, also new) Western Digital Caviar Serial ATA hard drive?
- Blazing-fast 400MHz front side bus
- Built-in 1394 (Firewire) support
- DualBIOS (for increased security and stability)
- Norton Internet Security and the rest of the pointless bundled software that always infests motherboard driver CDs
- Floppy disk drive port
Yep. And to add injury to insult, Gigabyte hadn’t even bothered to bundle a floppy with the required drivers in the package, so I had to beg a spare one off a neighbour (thank you, Diana), use my sister’s PC to put the drivers on it and only then could I hand it over to the XP installer so it could see the SATA controller. (First thing in next Amazon order – box of floppies.)
Fortunately, shiny new PC (expertly built by my shiny old girlfriend – look, I do software) is now perfectly happy and running fine, the occasional bizarre USB hard drive behaviour notwithstanding. Oh, and before you even consider it, “helpful advice” from Linux/Mac OS apologists will be returned with painful accounts of XFree bugs/dependency problems/”zapping the bloody PRAM”.
the only thing for mac apologists to say to this tale of floppy disc dependency is “iMac, August 1998″.
Which is ironic really, seeing as iMacs built before 2000 can’t boot off external drives.
See, it’s all very well saying things like “We may not have got everything right, but at least we knew the century was going to end”, but if you then follow it up with “Blimey! Hard drives bigger than 8Gbytes? Who’d have thought that?”, it doesn’t really have the same impact
BACK OF THE NET!