So, this weekend was interesting. I spent the better part of it preparing my apartment to become ‘our’ apartment when my girlfriend moves in with me at the end of the month. But a few hours yesterday were spent on a little ‘me’ time, and that meant finally taking apart my computer for a much-needed overhaul…
After my recent rant against pointless spending, I forced myself to avoid hypocrisy (and by force myself I mean I told Colin, who always manages to poignantly point out when I’m about to step in something foul, even if I don’t always listen). This meant that instead of buying the shiny new motherboard I wanted, along with new memory, video card, and cpu I would gladly give over someone else’s firstborn for, I was just going to buy what I needed to repair my current problem.
There were a couple of problems with my machine. First of all, whenever I booted, there was about a 30% chance the machine would bluescreen and halt dead with a rather ambiguous “Hardware Fault. Contact Your Hardware Vendor” error. Since I put this machine together myself with components purchased three years ago from various vendors, I suppose that meant me. Great, ’cause I was no help.
Secondly, whether it gave the BSOD or not, there would always be a loud grinding noise, like a fan wasn’t doing its job properly. Since I put the machine together back in my overclocking days, there were six fans that could have been causing that noise.
So, armed with scant patience but a fatalistic realization that things needed to get done, I went to my favorite online dealer, Newegg, and ordered up an Asus A7V600 to replace my aging EPoX board. There was no point getting a beefier motherboard, considering I still run an AMD Athlon XP 2100+ CPU, and PC2100 DDR RAM. Besides, total cost was only $38. And the new board supports SATA drives, making it attractive for any hard drive deals I come across.
At any rate, I pulled my full tower PC case out of it’s spot next to my desk and dragged it into the livingroom. Then I opened it. After allowing the bats to escape and dust to settle, I very carefully began cutting all the zip-ties I had used to make everything look neat and clean the last time I put the thing together. It was around this time that I spotted my first problem. A few motherboard manufacturers are known to have had problems with leaky capacitors, and EPoX has had a worse track record than most with this issue. I can only assume this was causing my random bad behavior. Also, my capacitors looked worse than the ones shown in the pics linked above!
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Why would replacing the motherboard require you to reinstall Windows XP?
When I was using linux, I used to dump my filesystems on CD-ROMs (this was back when my drive was only 8GB, so the compressed dump fit on ~10 cds, not so bad) and then just restore from those whenever I needed to replace my HDD — just boot off one cd-rom or the floppy, then run restore and start feeding the machine cds. (^_^)
You *could* technically just pop in the new motherboard, boot windows, and load up new drivers.
I say you *could*, but I wouldn’t recommend it. I’ve gone that route before, and thanks to the way drivers and stuff are handled in Windows, it hasn’t always worked right. While the orphaned libraries and other files are almost tolerable (unless you are enormously anal about such things, as I am), orphaned registry entries are often more trouble than they are worth, attempting to start hardware that isn’t there and calling software that is no longer tied to hardware. Overall, the performance hit and odd glitches that may come up just isn’t worth it.
Plus, unlike the various *nix flavors, Windows works best with a fresh install every year or so. It’s a ‘feature’.
You *could* install the new motherboard, boot into safe mode, remove the old devices, then install the new drivers. Which would eliminate any chance that future boot sequences would attempt to start-up devices that were no longer present.
Or you could go through all the trouble of reinstalling Windows for no reason…
Heh. Spoken like a man who truly expects things to work right from an OS.
Have you ever tried actually uninstalling devices and software, even in Safe Mode? I have, and let me tell you, as much as Windows claims you’ve removed every bit of it, it’s funny how a simple stroll through the registry will yield dozens of entries that were not, in fact, removed.
Besides, loading Windows itself takes no more time than doing what you suggested, even with the few drivers I had to install. It’s mostly the software reinstalls and tweaking that suck up all that time.
So, what’s the big obession with orphaned registry keys anyway? Oh no, they’re taking up valuable disk space! Or something.
As for devices, I’ve uninstalled them before without a problem. Really it’s up to the authors of the drivers to make sure that uninstall works properly; it has almost nothing to do with Microsoft or with Windows XP.
As for the amount of time required, I’d expect that reinstalling all of your software could take quite a long time. I’ve heard rumors that Microsoft will adopt Mac OS style packages for applications in Longhorn: all of the resources needed for the application to run, global configuration, etc., are stored inside an archive file that looks and acts just like a plain ol’ exe. Double-click on it and it runs, copy it to the hard drive and it’s “installed”.
I think those will stay rumors, unless Microsoft is going to help all of us developers port our code away from from using the registry…
My obsession comes from liking a clean machine. Which ‘doze doesn’t encourage.
Colin was telling me about the MacOS package system. Just a simple exe and all. Like some of the very simple tiny programs written by good programmers for Windows. I tell you, it was almost enough to make me see Macs in a different light. It may yet convince me where nothing else would.
And would Microsoft really need to do that? Couldn’t they create a compatibility mode with some sort of virtual registry? Hrm, on second thought, that wouldn’t work for gigantic mega-mega apps, since it would probably increase load times significantly, having to possibly create a registry every time you start an app.
I’m not sure what you mean when you’re talking about a “virtual registry”. Presumably Microsoft could map attempts to change the (former) registry with calls that actually modified the contents of a package (or like on Terminal Services, a private copy of portions of the registry for each user) at little to no performance penalty (as I hinted, it does this for applications runnign on a TS platform already).
So yeah, Microsoft could do that; it falls under the category of “helping us to port” our applications to their new package system, when and if it’s ever developed.
Of course, packages defeat the purpose of shared libraries, but disk space is hardly at a premium in this day and age.