The one with the one-week recovery.

Things have been hectic ever since I got back from Winnipeg. I guess I’ll start with a recap since my last post.

That Sunday morning, I called Eugene and they were going to meet us at Kum Koon Garden for dim sum. Ian, Jazmine, and I got ready and went to Chinatown with no muss or fuss. We went to Kum Koon, found parking, and reserved a table, which had a 20-30 minute wait. In actuality, we got our table in less than 15 minutes, so I was impressed. After we settled in, I went to see if Eugene and Jennilee had arrived yet, and I ended up waiting over 20 minutes, because Eugene had to go pick up Jennilee’s friend, and he accidentally missed a turn into Chinatown. Sad.

Anyway, we all got our food, ate happily, and I even got pineapple buns to take home. Unfortunately, I realized too late on Tuesday that I left it all in Ian and Jazmine’s apartment, so if you two are reading this – happy eating! Again (I did the same thing last time). After that, Eugene had to take off with Jennilee and friend (Cathy? Kathy? Spelling woes.), so Ian, Jazmine, and I (I’m just gonna refer to us as Team A from now on… XD) went to Sun Wah to pick up groceries for my parents (and for the couple as well). I forgot my phone at the apartment, so I had to borrow Ian’s Motorola RAZR to call Dad for his shopping list. We ended up with quite a bit of groceries and we still had to hit St. James and Staples to run other errands (for OTHER people! O_O), so we went back to the apartment, dropped off the groceries, and went back downtown via Kenaston Blvd this time around. We hit CBit first, picked up what I needed for Dennis and a computer service client, and also a power supply for Ian’s PC. In all my haste, I forgot to pick up a 3.5″ to 2.5″ HDD adapter. Oops. Anyway, we hit Staples after that, but they didn’t have the cash register that my aunt wanted for her new jewelry store, however, they called the Staples on Pembina and had them hold it for me until the next day. We were going to watch a movie after that, but Jaz was tired, and Ian and I reasoned that because it was only the third day from the premiere, the theater was going to be packed, so we gave up and went back to the apartment so that I could tackle Ian’s PC early. What happened after that was an ordeal of blood, sweat, and tears. I crashed the car and killed us all. No? Darn it, I didn’t want to recap what actually happened. -_-

Okay, so I started on Ian’s PC. I yanked out his old PSU, popped in the new one, took out his old HDDs, and plugged in the new SATA one. I rewired his lights and hooked up his card reader drive. When I started it up, POST wouldn’t detect the drive. No biggie, just went into BIOS, enabled SATA, set up a correct boot order, and restarted. Booted off the XP CD, started the install. “No hard drives or partitions are available.” Wha? It seemed as though his SATA controller chipset was so obscure, Windows needed a third party driver to see it in setup. Okay, so I went to the website on my laptop, grabbed the latest setup driver, and put it on my USB flash drive. Popped in the flash drive, booted the PC, went to specify the third-party driver, and hit the next roadblock. “Please insert the manufacturer’s floppy disk into drive A.” WTF, mate? We had no floppy disks. I ended up grabbing my Linux boot disk and formatting it, only to find out that it was a bad disk. I had no other choice but to use my customized Win98 boot disk, back it up to Ian’s old HDD (had to swap it back in), and put the driver on it. Smooth sailing, right? Nope. It was around this time between swapping HDDs that we experienced something weird – the PC wouldn’t power on. No juice at all. We reseated the cables and tried it again, and it worked, but it steadily got worse and worse as time went on. We kept moving the PC into the cabinet, and out of the cabinet. We kept reseating cables over and over again. Merlin kept leaping up and sleeping on the case’s side window. It was a nightmare. I finally called up Thor, my colleague from Nexi, and he popped over to drop off a spare molex-to-SATA power converter cable at my request (I knew it was a good idea to let him use my office when he was in town two weeks prior, AND copy all of BSG on DVD for him). We were gonna do lunch the next day, but his schedule was busy, so we took a raincheck for the next time I’d be in the city. The reason I needed the converter was in the odd chance that I’d have to use the old PSU. I never did, though, no thanks to my stubbornness.

INTERMISSION. We watched SHINOBI.

I finally swapped back the new HDD and booted to XP setup again. I was able to specify the third party driver and load it correctly into setup, and I installed XP. We installed apps and all that jazz, but when it came time to slave his old HDD, we experienced more power issues. At that point, I was ready to hang myself (Just like at work! Fun fun fun!). We eventually got the slave HDD in. I finally figured out that if you get the power working, the PC will continue to power on after shutdown if you don’t unplug the power cable. Interesting. Even now, I still have no idea what the issue could be – bad/defective PSU, or bad/defective sysbd? Who cares? The damn thing is working now, and we’ll be starting in on building a new PC for Ian the next time around (recycle his parts).

The next morning, I did some more app installs and stuff. Pretty much finalized things for him. He almost had the system ready for Norton Ghost to create an image. I still don’t know if he completed it successfully. Anyway, that morning, Jazmine had to go to work at 12:00, and I had to get ready to leave. I packed everything into the car, and decided to have lunch with Ian before leaving, since I needed to pick up the cash register. We went to FutureShop so that Ian could get some DVD+R’s to make the Ghost image, and then Staples to get the cash register. We ended up hitting Quizno’s on Kenaston Blvd for lunch, and then I dropped off Ian, and hit Route 90 North via Academy Rd.

Then I drove back to Corydon Ave because Ian forgot his DVD+R’s in the car. XD

I grabbed Wendy’s on the way out, but I didn’t eat it until I got home. I have a problem with eating food while traveling. In short, my stomach disagrees.

On Tuesday, I went back to work. Unfortunately, I did next to nothing. Well, not true. I started working on the customer computer I had. The damn thing wouldn’t detect the HDD. I gave up on it for a bit, and had plans to check out MTS at lunch, since Ian’s RAZR really impressed me. Mom and AM came with and we looked at the shared plans. Esmond needed a cell for university anyway, so we chose one for him and I got the frakking Motorola RAZR V3c. Since we spent my whole lunch hour at MTS, I had to skip lunch and go back to the office to respond to a page. The phones would be ready at 15:00. Since I was still being lazy, I ended up going to lunch at Baaco’s with Dennis so I could also give him his HDD. I accidentally dropped it, though. More on that later. After work (if you could call it that), I picked up the phones. AM didn’t get a new phone though, so I chastised her for it and said that the pink Samsung phone she liked was free with the 24 month contract. She went back the next day to get it.

This is a monumental occasion! I got myself a rather advanced phone when I argued that I would never need one! I also hated the fact that all new phones didn’t have built-in composers when my old one did, but after asking questions, I found out that Motorola’s Mobile Phone Tools software had a ringtone composer built in, plus the RAZR accepts MP3 ringtones. Good enough for me. So, in a way, this is all your fault, Ian! I bet it’s payback for me showing you my HP iPaq hx2410! Oh, well, this makes us even.

On Wednesday, I got my butt back in gear at work. Had lunch with Mom at Grapes. Looked at the customer computer again, found that the BIOS was a little outdated, so I searched for an update, and painstakingly found it after realizing I’d been chasing the wrong BIOS version. n00b mistake!! Got XP installed on the damn PC and let it perform updates all night. Dennis was having problems with the new HDD, probably due to me dropping it.

Yesterday, I finally downloaded the latest Motorola Mobile Phone Tools software. What, me? Pay for something I can get for free? I also have the cable anyway, since it’s a standard mini-USB type. I installed a new wallpaper, video, and two new MP3 ringtones, one from AIR and the other is the fanfare theme from FINAL FANTASY VII. Sweet. I still can’t believe I have such a cool phone!! >_< Anyway, after work, I went to Dennis' place to check out his HDD. Yep, it was making popcorn noises. I made him a copy of the receipt and packed the HDD for him to ship out for replacement. In the meantime, I got his old HDD going and started installing XP. I had a feeling that he never deleted his old partitions, which were probably the cause of all his problems. Today, I have only a couple things to do, but it's all good. I just got paid for the customer computer work I did, so I made a couple preorders - they're on my page. The damn Logitech G7 mouse was also on sale at NCIX, so I ordered that this morning. Later on, I'll post about this very interesting conversation I had with Daniel last night. 以上。。。であります！