Hardware upgrades made hard

Thu 20th January 2005 18:56 EET

After my wife complained about me staying up all night playing Counter-Strike, and the CPU fan keeping her awake, I had to do something. Yes, get a better CPU cooler, and while I'm at it, I wanted a second 512 MBs of RAM. So, the plan was to switch the cooler and add a memory chip - no worries, what could possibly go wrong?

Yet again I was proven wrong. I bought the Zalman CNPS7000B-Cu, which was very highly rated in several online reviews. I opted for the cheap "nameless" RAM, as the first chip is of similar kind. So, I spent few hours on last Saturday to take my computer apart and put it together again - nothing special in the installation process.

Everything back together and it was time to fire-up the computer, no need to be nervous about it, right? I first booted only to the BIOS setup to monitor the CPU and motherboard temperature and to control the fan speed. Everything good there, and the CPU on idle was staying around 12 celsius' lower than it used to be. Even the RAM was correctly registered, excellent!

Time to put the new fan to a test by playing some rounds of Farcry. Since the CNPS7000B-Cu comes with a Zalman Fan Mate 2 (a knob to control the fan speed, and thus the level of noise) I really wanted to set the fan as slow as possible without over-heating the CPU.

Time to put the new fan to a test by playing some rounds of Farcry, and what do I get? No, it's not the blue screen, but a black screen with a text:

Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM

As per the instructions provided, I should repair my XP installation. Doesn't sound so good to me. The first thing that came to my mind was that the RAM chip was not compatible with the older one. So, I plugged the new one off, and XP started nice and normal. Fine, I replaced the old RAM chip with the new one, and the XP started nice and normal. OK, let's insert the old chip to the second slot and keep the new one in the first, and the XP started nice and normal!

Damn Billy, it's alive! Happily I went to sleep (around 02:00) thinking that I had solved the problem. So came the Sunday morning and my wife started the computer to read her e-mail. All good, except the fact that it got stuck - nothing to do but to power cycle it. I was already having a bad feeling about cold restart, and there it was again - black screen with the above mentioned error message.

It was time to pull off the Google and look for some answers. The solution was found from some tech forum where some thoughtful user had posted a link to Microsoft support pages. So the problem was a corrupted registry file, the instructions are pretty long but well detailed.

After going through the whole set, I was at the point where Windows had to be re-activated. For some reason I was unable to activate via Internet, so I had to call the free support line. That was also a rather interesting experience - a discussion with a pre-programmed phone service. Please insert the next section of the registration code... Yeah, it was fun to punch in the really long winded code with a mobile phone and all the while try to listen to the instructions that were slowly being read by the computer at the other end. Still, I think it was better than listening for irregular farao's and omega's by a real person.

Anyways, had a fun weekend while installing two new components, and ending up almost re-installing the whole OS. This is exactly why I try to keep my hands outside the box as much as possible.