Retarded Kids

A few months back I helped a friend in need build a PC of his dreams for around 500 USD. He was a WOW junkie and needed a new PC to play on. His old PC seemingly bit the bullet. This friend is not very computer savvy so I thought his old HP Pavillion might be worth the effort to salvage. Wanting to build a MythTV box for some time, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to build such a box.

Being the friend that I am, I decided to cut any profit on the custom PC I was building for him in trade for the HP Pavillion. Seemed fair enough to me. Although, hindsight now tells me that I should have had foresight in mind before I was blindsided by the stupidity in which I have unleashed upon myself. Final note on brief setup, I haven't heard back from the friend I built the machine for, so his machine must be doing well.

[More:]

Upon first inspection of the HP, I noticed a little neglect in the cleaning department. A few layers of dust caked everything in. After habitually rearranging everything and cleaning, I took it for it's first boot. I was greeted with a beautiful screen stating one sentence. If it had been a color, it would have been.... blue. While listening to the drive it did sound a bit dated but wasn't clanking or making any other dead sounds. I wasn't bother by this much because the HP did indeed power up.

Choosing to be lazy I downloaded Fedora Core 4. Normally I would prefer FreeBSD, but doing a little research I learned that using MythTV on a FreeBSD box might be a little harder to undertake. We will have to save that for a later project when I'm more familiar with the software.

Inserting the first disc and starting my installation all seemed to go well. When I got to the partitioning stage the HP froze. I waited a bit thinking it was a fluke, but soon realized I couldn't have it easy. The screen started turning weird shades of blue stripe. Although strange, I knew it couldn't be good. I decided to exchange the strange sounding drive with another one. Fortunately, my girlfriend gave me a spare drive she had laying around. After thirty minutes of PC modification time I was all set with another drive.

Starting the installation process again went rather well. The partition set up correctly and packages were configured for a minimal install. Things were going great until the formating of the new drive. Another blue striped color frozen pattern later, I stabbed the power button. Rebooting the machine and trying again I went a little quicker. It actually started formatting the drive on this time around, so I decided to run downstairs for a bit. When I came back up it was frozen blue stripe. By this point I was starting to wonder if blue striped pattern was an HP version of Windows (No, I'm not linking it). A little frustrated I pulled everything loose and gave up for the night. Contemplating a new motherboard, RAM, and a case with a PSU would definitely cover anything that is broken.... I hope.

This first written project of mine doesn't seem to be much of anything interesting. I have written a lot and most of it doesn't seem interesting or informational enough that anyone would want to read it. It is definitely not up to even my standards. If you did make it all the way through this and don't want to jump off a cliff, thank you for sticking with me until the end.

This post is licensed under a
Creative Commons License.