Hardware and I have a long history of not getting along very well.
It turns out that I can’t re-use my 250GB PATA drives in the new Dell because the bottom mounting locations don’t have enough clearance for the PATA to SATA converters, it’s so tight that a native SATA drive has to use an angled connector. There are a pair of external 3.5″ bays as well but they don’t look like they’d get any airflow and I need one of them for my floppy drive / memory card reader.
The fancy-schmancy multi-IO card that I got doesn’t seem to present my PATA DVD/RWs to the system as bootable devices, tho I’m only 90% certain that I didn’t overlook something in the Dell BIOS, and the onboard SATA controller doesn’t like them at all when used with the PATA to SATA converter.
And one or both of the new 1GB DDR2 sticks are bad, processes were crashing like crazy and the system wouldn’t survive more than 10 minutes before a BSOD. I’ve tried swapping banks, swapping the order, and removing the Dell 512MB sticks. Swapped ‘em out and put the Dell RAM back in this morning, surfed the web and watched a couple of TV shows from the Media Center box without issue. Tonight I’ll try to figure out which piece of RAM is the culprit…
With all this trouble I haven’t even had a chance to try Vista Ultimate yet.
As much as I hate the ridiculous mark-up on BTO upgrades, next time I will man up and pay it to avoid this crap.
