Over the weekend I tried to help friends upgrade the motherboard and processor in their PC and today I tried to put some more RAM in another pal's PC. Both are broken now and in need of much TLC.

It's all Windows' fault, I'm sure of it.

Additionally, I'm trying to get Windows 7 SP1 to install on my 64-bit VM. The download keeps stalling about half-way, either from Windows Update or the download page.

Also, I'm re-installing the original Microsoft Windows Vista on my Dell Vostro, to return to the boss as I've recently gotten my new Macbook Pro instead. So far, that isn't broken, but it's taking a while, and it makes me a little sad inside to see the Vostro go.

The bigger upgrade was rather massive. A new motherboard, with a new processor and new RAM to match. I warned them that this can be difficult as Windows will likely complain of the many changes, and may have trouble with the HAL if chipset drivers or similer are loaded. The hardware installation went smoothly. Nice motherboard, nice quad-core processor, and 4GB of RAM, with 2 slots to spare. One downside of the motherboard is that it only has 1 PATA connector, which is OK, as it has 6 SATA connectors. Unfortunately, this meant that one of the optical drives couldn't be used.

When rebooting, it seemed fine, at first. It would POST, and then splash the Windows start-up screen, and then reboot. It wouldn't boot in Safe Mode either. I tried booting Linux from a USB stick, but it seemed to fail every time it would flip to the GUI. Some experimenting revealed that the OS was trying to use the HDMI output for the GUI, even though it would POST and even splash on the VGA output. Hooking an HDMI cable between PC and monitor took care of that, but Windows still wouldn't fully boot, even in Safe Mode.

I tried letting Windows repair itself, hoping just maybe it'd load enough of the base stuff to change the other drivers. I copied the entire contents of their HDD to my external drive, and tried an installation over the existing Windows. That seemed to work. It'd boot and allow me to tweak some things.

Further trouble with the new chips, though, as the drivers came on a DVD, but chance would have it that was the sacrificed optical drive, and the IDE cable wouldn't stretch to reach it. Rather than rearrange the drives, I copied the drivers to my USB thumb drive, too. This let me get the Northbridge, PCI, audio, network, and video drivers installed. The network gave me a little trouble, too. It seems the connection was limited to the old MAC address. I quickly spoofed that, and the Internet was back. Finally, it seemed like progress.

Then it entered a dreaded authentication endless loop. When booting it would say "you need to authenticat Windows before using," selecting OK brought forth a "Windows is already authenticated" window, and selecting OK on that would reboot and start over.

It was at this point that the consensus was that we'd been there long enough, as it was fast approaching midnight. Even Star Wars on the tube wasn't keeping enough interest. We left the machine in it's perpetual state, with a pledge to find the solution and return.

The little upgrade was supposed to be quick and easy. He has 4x256MB sticks in his machine, and I had a couple compatible 512MB sticks to spare. It seemed like an easy replacement. The machine boots sometimes, but gripes that the memory isn't properly paired; fine, use single-channel mode as the extra RAM will be better than the dual-channel performance. However, when it says that, it won't continue past the POST screen, either.

Catching the system during POST and going into the BIOS settings causes the screen to splash with a grid of unwanted missing pixels. Replacing the original RAM hasn't done the trick, either.

To at least not leave him machine-less, I've pulled out a similar machine and am trying to update its OSs. It dual-boots Windows XP and Ubuntu, but the Ubuntu was 9.10, so I'm putting 10.10 on it. Also, since the machine has been off for about a whole year, XP has a whole peck of updates to run as well. Firefox won't run on Windows, and the AVG was so out of date that it seemed to force the network to stop functioning. I'm alternating between updates there, with each reboot trying to catch and swap OSs. Right now, though it's taking its sweet time downloading all of the Ubuntu updates.

As I wrap this up, the Vostro re-install has stalled, the screen has gone black leaving just a mouse and no more hard disk activity. The VM download of SP1 has finally finished, and the installer is running unassisted; so far (finally) so good.

Somewhere in the last week I've lost my machine mojo. I've started to think that bump on my head last month may have had an actual impact! (Pun intended.)