I have been doing IT for some 7 years now, like I've mentioned a couple of times, in different fields which range from Call Center Technical Support, the cheapo and fancy version, up to personal support to customers and companies that range between your mom and pops business up to the thousands of employees Corporation, and never have I personally found something as disgusting or annoying as an eMachines Desktop.
Yes I get the point about building affordable systems for the common user but for the love of whatever it is that you praise do it right man and I am dead serious here.
All this comes here for one reason. Two days ago I bought this old L7VMM MOBO from the guy that gives me the old computers I refurbish and let me tell you that these two last days have been terror and horror to me but also they have provoked me to look for answers to things I had previously learned and with that I had forgotten since I never used them.
I couldn't quite remember how to format a PC from a floppy, yes I am serious about the floppy thing and I have a bunch of them stored in a box, and it has been a while since I saw a FAT32 Partition in something that isn't a USB drive. That said it's also been years since I've seen a K7 in use, an AMD Duron @ 650 MHz to be precise, and I wanted to put it to use since... well the codename of the processor is "Spitfire" and using a computer with a CPU named like that sounds killer although it turned out to be a complete bummer.
How did all of this really start?
First off I placed everything in a case, that ironically states outside that it uses a P3 Celeron 600MHz CPU and that this PC NEVER goes obsolete...
Next, I try booting straight from the HDD with no luck and I start working around with it. Then I notice, in horror, that this is one of those PC's that for the life of me won't boot up from the CD-Drive and I am not sure why this is even happening but it has me terrified.
My first alternative turned out to be a Windows 98 boot floppy with CD-ROM support, because maybe you don't know it but back in the day some things weren't supported like CD-ROM drives or Floppy Drives and USB was non-existent.
As mentioned further above it had been a while since I saw a full partition of FAT32 and from there on it just went downhill. I got the CD recognized and I ran the WINNT exe to get the installation going but at first it wouldn't do it mentioning something about not enough swap space. Some ten minutes later I figured that I had to delete the NTFS partition that was occupying 99% of the hard drive... yeah I kept forgetting how the commands work.
Next stop was trying WINNT and it partially worked, then died on me, then worked, then died again, then I decided to go for Nomad, the codename for a 4GB hard drive I got laying around holding Debian 6, and it went into a deep coma state that could only be prevented if I went into the recovery state which meant I had to mess around with it a lot more than I wished for it, openSUSE laughed at me too or cried, not sure at this point, but it didn't work, Windows XP from another machine didn't work either and I've had it with this PC that will only run floppy systems, nothing bad with them but if I try and sell it to the normal customer I won't get much out of it.
Then there's the suspicion that the CPU may be damaged but I have no way to prove this since yet again I have no way to load Hirens or any other tool to test this out, RAM is also an option but that would give me a whole different bunch of errors and from what I've read, seen and understood it seems the culprit is the motherboard which has to be flashed immediately after being bought because of buggy software on the BIOS ROM which can only be done inside of Windows.
Level of Patience, almost null.
One more alternative before I give away and ask for my 10 bucks back... Windows 98 2nd Edition. May work, may not work, I don't know and I don't care but I am not letting this bad boy go out without a battle.
And in the end that also failed... that sums it up after I saw Windows 98 getting stuck several times during the installation and having to force the "restart" physically. At this point I am pretty sure the culprit is the processor and well there's nothing much I can do about this except return it and get my money back and buy a soda or something.
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