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Upgrade horror stories
This computer upgrade horror story relates to my HDD horror story, which is in another thread.
One day, I decided to upgrade my Pentium 100 to a Pentium 166 MMX. Of course, I needed a new motherboard.
So after dishing out Australian $500 for the CPU and motherboard (a somewhat cheap one from a company called Spear), it was decided that my RAM would have to be replaced as well, since the new motherboard only supported EDO RAM. So a couple of hundred dollars went away with some new EDO RAM, and I finally brought my system home (after 3 business days of "upgrading").
Unfortunately, the system still did not work at this time, since it would not boot at all, so I brought my system back to the computer store. They kept on saying this was a software issue, which may very well be, but they said that they did not touch the software so it isn't their responsibility (I thought that their responsibility was to do the upgrade and make sure the system works, at the very least - it appears they didn't even test the system after the upgrade).
After hours of arguing about this, they finally gave up the fight and decided to fix my system - they wanted to remove my existing HDD and add a new HDD to it so they can install a new clean OS and test the setup - fair enough. Of course, they nearly wiped out my HDD, if I hadn't pointed out that they were trying to FDISK my current HDD, as opposed to the new HDD - they "wisely" decided to disconnect my HDD, just in case they did something stupid again.
Anyway, after installing the new OS, everything was working fine, so they said I needed a new OS (I was using Windows 95 at that time, but they said I needed Windows 95 OSR2) - they wanted to charge me $150 for the new OS, which I saw was just an OEM CD (no box, manuals, license ...). I said no.
It was at this time they re-connected my old HDD and found that it will not boot anymore, because it had been extensively damaged - along with all my data!!
So a replacement drive was put in, I went home and re-installed everything, and it still did not work. I did manage to do some tricky things to make the thing boot into Windows, although my Panasonic CD-ROM drive would not work all the time now. I decided this was acceptable, and I really did not want to go back to that computer store ever again (as a side note, that computer store was later sued my Microsoft for software piracy, and fined quite a lot of money - I swear I had nothing to do with it - really
).
Anyway, 6 month later I finally found out what was causing the problem - it was my CD-ROM driver. Apparently, the software engineers at Panasonic could not write a driver that worked on CPUs faster than 100 MHz - and it was only later that a 100 MHz + drive was released. Finally, everything started working fine, although the build quality of the motherboard was not up to standard (but that's another story ...)
Moral of the story : don't upgrade your CPU/motherboard - small upgrades are okay, but CPU/motherboard means too many changed things, and you still have your old components in there anyway, which will cause bottlenecks. If you do need to upgrade your CPU/motherboard, just save up get a new system instead.
If you need another horror story, there is one about my friend's upgrade of his IBM computer at another computer store. It was one of those with non-standard casing, and basically it was determined that his system could not be upgraded and that he needed a new system (and it only took about 5 hours to figure this out). Fortunately, the computer store guys were good guys, and they gave him a very very good price on a new system, and did all the work in one day (they were there at the computer store until midnight that day). Of course, the new system cost my friend double what he had intended to pay for, but I think it was worth it.
One day, I decided to upgrade my Pentium 100 to a Pentium 166 MMX. Of course, I needed a new motherboard.
So after dishing out Australian $500 for the CPU and motherboard (a somewhat cheap one from a company called Spear), it was decided that my RAM would have to be replaced as well, since the new motherboard only supported EDO RAM. So a couple of hundred dollars went away with some new EDO RAM, and I finally brought my system home (after 3 business days of "upgrading").
Unfortunately, the system still did not work at this time, since it would not boot at all, so I brought my system back to the computer store. They kept on saying this was a software issue, which may very well be, but they said that they did not touch the software so it isn't their responsibility (I thought that their responsibility was to do the upgrade and make sure the system works, at the very least - it appears they didn't even test the system after the upgrade).
After hours of arguing about this, they finally gave up the fight and decided to fix my system - they wanted to remove my existing HDD and add a new HDD to it so they can install a new clean OS and test the setup - fair enough. Of course, they nearly wiped out my HDD, if I hadn't pointed out that they were trying to FDISK my current HDD, as opposed to the new HDD - they "wisely" decided to disconnect my HDD, just in case they did something stupid again.
Anyway, after installing the new OS, everything was working fine, so they said I needed a new OS (I was using Windows 95 at that time, but they said I needed Windows 95 OSR2) - they wanted to charge me $150 for the new OS, which I saw was just an OEM CD (no box, manuals, license ...). I said no.
It was at this time they re-connected my old HDD and found that it will not boot anymore, because it had been extensively damaged - along with all my data!!
So a replacement drive was put in, I went home and re-installed everything, and it still did not work. I did manage to do some tricky things to make the thing boot into Windows, although my Panasonic CD-ROM drive would not work all the time now. I decided this was acceptable, and I really did not want to go back to that computer store ever again (as a side note, that computer store was later sued my Microsoft for software piracy, and fined quite a lot of money - I swear I had nothing to do with it - really
). Anyway, 6 month later I finally found out what was causing the problem - it was my CD-ROM driver. Apparently, the software engineers at Panasonic could not write a driver that worked on CPUs faster than 100 MHz - and it was only later that a 100 MHz + drive was released. Finally, everything started working fine, although the build quality of the motherboard was not up to standard (but that's another story ...)
Moral of the story : don't upgrade your CPU/motherboard - small upgrades are okay, but CPU/motherboard means too many changed things, and you still have your old components in there anyway, which will cause bottlenecks. If you do need to upgrade your CPU/motherboard, just save up get a new system instead.
If you need another horror story, there is one about my friend's upgrade of his IBM computer at another computer store. It was one of those with non-standard casing, and basically it was determined that his system could not be upgraded and that he needed a new system (and it only took about 5 hours to figure this out). Fortunately, the computer store guys were good guys, and they gave him a very very good price on a new system, and did all the work in one day (they were there at the computer store until midnight that day). Of course, the new system cost my friend double what he had intended to pay for, but I think it was worth it.
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