I finally got my system working.

After I wrote that blog post, I used nLite to set up a slipstream of XP 32-bit with the correct nVidia SATA drivers. I then reformatted the system, partitioned as I really wanted (3 partitions: C: 30GB for program files and Windows; D: 174GB for music and movies; E: 30GB for personal files.) I partition this way so I can always reformat without having to back up all my music and personal files.

Anyway, I got Windows installed and then realized I had neglected to slipstream either the nVidia video driver or the Ethernet driver. Hmm. I grabbed the SD card out of my Treo and dropped it into my laptop, then grabbed the latest nVidia drivers from this link (which is what I was following to slipstream the drivers in the first place.) I downloaded to the card, put the card in my desktop (yeah, every computer I own has a SD card reader) and installed the drivers. Then I rebooted…and promptly freaked out.

The system wasn’t booting. It just sat there and blinky-cursored at me (after I ignored the prompt to boot from CD.) “Fuck…another reformat!” I thought to myself. I popped in the Windows CD. It booted into the setup options and I realized it was seeing my SD card as a potential destination for my Windows install. “I wonder if it’s trying to boot off the SD card,” I mused. I popped the card out, rebooted, and sure enough, Windows came back up. Stupid computer! (Side note: When I have my backup drive plugged in via USB, it tries to boot off that, too. Sigh.)

Anyway, after installing 51 Windows updates (please note I had slipstreamed SP2 onto my CD, so this is 51 updates after SP2), some more drivers, and rebooting a few more times, I had a working system. So far, so good. I’m now copying all my music files off my backup drive. I had all my CDs ripped into MP3, but they don’t all fit on my iPod, so I had them stored on the backup drive. It’s been 6 months since I’ve been able to easily access my backed-up MP3s. They’re copying over to this system now. It’s nice to have them back!

Also, iTunes works now, so either it was a corrupt download problem or it didn’t work under Windows x64 with my system.

All good for now. If the system has any more problems, I will post annother update.

I bought a Shuttle SN26P barebones in January. It’s now June and the darn thing still isn’t working right. In this blog, I’ll explain my rationale behind this decision, what mistakes I’ve made, and what I’m going to do to finally get a working desktop system.

Background
In January, my desktop computer (a Pentium 4/3GHz) finally bit the dust. It had been having boot problems for a while — so much so that I made sure everything was backed up on a regular basis and ceased turning the darn thing off at night like I had been previously. One day, I needed to reboot because the system hung hard, and that was that… the system never worked again.

It wasn’t a huge deal for me, as all important data had been backed up on my laptop and I’d known this day was coming for quite a while now. Nonetheless, I wanted to get my desktop up and running again, so I hauled it in to Simpli and had Russ take a look at it.

After pulling out a spider web and a pile of cat hair, Russ decided that there were several problems that had caused my system to finally bite the dust. First of all, my ancient ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 7500 video card had a fan that had died, which was probably what had been causing my (more and more frequent) system hangs. (Video card overheats… system dies. Sounds logical to me.) Since I didn’t really need a fancy video card — just one with DVI that supported 1600×1024 resolution, Russ offered to sell me his old one. “Great!” I said. He brought it in, plugged it in to my desktop, and lo and behold…nothing. Still dead.

Further diagnostics ensued. Whoops… not only had the video card died, but the reason my system had utterly failed, as opposed to just hanging on a regular basis and not booting properly, was that my motherboard (an older Asus) was also dead. “Hey,” I said, “that explains all of the USB problems I’ve been having of late.” (I was having a lot of problems where I would plug in my Treo or iPod to sync and get a “USB device has malfunctioned” error in Windows.)

At this point, with a dead video card, a dead motherboard, an obsolete Socket 478 processor, and a CD-RW drive that needed an upgrade anyway, I decided it was time to build a new system. We parted the ol’ desktop out and Lawrence from Ymetro (who works upstairs from us) now has the case. The processor went who-knows-where (I think into a desktop at Simpli) and the memory and CD-RW drive were set aside to assist me in building a new system.

After doing some research, I decided on a Shuttle machine. I wanted a tiny desktop that didn’t take up much space, was deathly quiet, and ran like a dream. I also decided on a nice dual-DVI video card, paying a small fortune for it but deciding that it was worth it because I could have two DVI ports for my two SGI 1600SW monitors. I decided to go with my first non-Intel desktop and pick the 64-bit AMD processor with the Nforce4 chipset. Little did I know what I was about to get into.

At the risk of taking the rest of the day to summarize this, here is what has happened over the past 6 months. Keep in mind this system goes for $2700 retail. This is NOT a low-end desktop. This is a premium, cream-of-the-crop sort of desktop. The fact that it has taken so long to even get up and running is disappointing in its own right, but it gets better…

What Happened
I bought Windows XP x64 Edition. I figured it would be able to run 32-bit applications. After all, on Microsoft’s website, it says “Windows XP Professional x64 Edition gives you access to greater amounts of memory while continuing to support 32-bit applications.” WRONG! Or should I say… NOT EXACTLY! While some 32-bit applications will work, most won’t. And that “most” means I would have to spend hundreds of dollars upgrading every application I use to the latest and greatest bleeding-edge stuff to even have a prayer of it working. Let me give you some quick examples of what does not work: iTunes (even though Apple claims it does); any version of Photoshop older than CS2; older versions of Dreamweaver (I’m still on MX 2004!); PartitionMagic; most virus scanners; most backup applications; most anything that burns CDs… and on and on and on and on.

Taking a step backwards… before I even found out about this problem, I had to get Windows XP x64 installed. That turned out to be a nightmarish experience. I have installed XP approximately 25 times on this computer. First, the Nforce4 drivers that Nvidia provided with the Shuttle do not work properly on x64. I tossed those and got the latest version, which, by the way, have to be installed from a floppy disk during the Windows XP install. Gee, I don’t have a floppy disk drive! Okay, I’ll be ghetto and hang one off the side of the computer. There, that worked.

Now Windows is installed, but the first time it reboots after the install, it hangs, saying it can’t find ntldr.sys. There is no solution other than to reformat, because this error means Windows can’t see your hard drive. I got conflicting reports from forums. I tried slipstreaming the drivers onto the CD instead of loading them from the floppy. No change. I tried different drivers from Nvidia’s site. No change. I tried some drivers from some German site. No change. Finally, I stumbled upon the answer. It appears that when you load the drivers off the floppy, or slipstream them onto the disk, if they are not “Microsoft certified”, Windows replaces them with its own drivers upon first reboot. So Windows replaced the drivers for the Nvidia SATA chipset with “Generic IDE” drivers of its own, which, of course, do not work with my chipset, thus destroying the system before it even had a chance to activate Windows. Solution? Someone hacked the drivers to stop Windows from doing that. I deployed the hacked drivers and it worked. (UGH!!!!) This problem alone took me probably 15 hours of work to resolve.

One of the first things I downloaded onto my new (and finally working!) system was iTunes. Unfortunately, iTunes does not work with some 64-bit systems. But before I even had a chance to discover that, I noticed that anything that I downloaded larger than about 20MB was giving strange CRC errors on install. In fact, any file I downloaded was a few bytes off the size it was supposed to be. Back to the forums I went. Hmm, looks like a lot of people using Nforce4 chipsets have this problem. And the problem is… memory bandwidth. The Nforce4 chipset says it supports dual-channel DDR400 RAM, and sets itself up automatically for that in the BIOS, and then (for whatever reason) the system cannot “write” quickly enough to its SATA chipset from RAM (especially when you have RAID-1 enabled on the chipset…I do), and “misses” a few bytes. What I want to know is… how the fuck did this get past QA? I have a $2700 (retail; I didn’t pay that much) system and here you’re telling me that the RAM it’s supposed to support does not actually work in it. Great. But since I only had DDR333 RAM anyway (remember, I’m using the RAM that worked fine in my last computer, and I ran a thorough memtest86 to confirm that there were no issues with the RAM itself), I went ahead and set my BIOS to force the RAM to DDR333 speed. Problem fixed… I think.

Today
I am typing this on my “new” system. It works, but it’s louder than I would have liked. XP x64 does not meet my needs, so I will likely go back to regular Windows XP. And I’m still concerned about the overall reliability of my system. My P4/3GHz worked great for 2 1/2 years before it finally started having problems. This system had problems out of the box, and while most problems can be fixed with new hardware, this looks like a buggy SATA chipset or RAM problem from Shuttle/nVidia that cannot be fixed simply by upgrading. It’s unfortunate that such a high-end system would run in to so many problems. I’m going to reformat to Windows XP (32-bit) soon, and will try to remember to post an update once I get that up and running. For now, my vote, for what it is worth, is to completely avoid nVidia’s Nforce4 chipset and to stick with Intel wherever you can (dual Opteron servers excluded.)

Update: I finally got it working. Complete details here.

S and I first met in person in November, when I came to NYC and ended up staying at his place in Manhattan. There, we realized we have a lot in common. I first noticed it when I stepped off the plane to find him waiting for me and reading a book on quantum physics. It was then that I knew we would get along really well. We were shocked to find we had even more in common, from general attitudes toward life to personality tests (Myers-Briggs INTJ; Enneagram type 3) to jobs (S managed a datacenter for a big NYC Forex firm; I run a hosting company. The jobs are shockingly similar) to having been burned in relationships in the past and the consistent struggle to find someone who gets past the tough outer shell and into our hearts. S is a Pisces and I am a Cancer, which also makes us a natural fit, and also makes him best friend #4 of mine who is a Pisces.

The unfortunate thing is that S and I can’t be in a relationship because we drive each other crazy. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but the fact is that when you’re 99% the same as someone, the 1% of the time when you are completely different is so annoying as to be fatally damaging to any relationship that would try to develop. So that’s a bummer. But the good news is we realized that really quickly and were able to adjust to being best friends and having conversations that go something along the lines of “Can you fucking believe that <event> happened?” “No way! Well, here’s what you should do. …” “I TOTALLY AGREE!” And this goes on multiple times a day. The really good news is I’ve hired S temporarily to help get a bunch of stuff going on at Simpli, so all of our customers will have some cool new toys to play with this summer. And, before he moves out here on May 5, I just wanted to say, S, I couldn’t get through a day without you there to bounce ideas off of and tell me about all those cool websites you find (except UserFriendly. I could do without more UserFriendly links!) And, above all, I am glad that you are one of my best friends, and I will definitely support you in whatever you decide to do with your life. I love you with all my heart. Welcome to California!

If you would have asked me a month ago about the importance of “me time”, I would have told you it was important. But I never realized how much it balances me to have that time alone. Though I do have lots of conversations with others, I need time alone to digest them. When I don’t get that time, I start to break down. After just 48 hours of not having “me time”, I could feel things start to crack.

This is what I learned. When I’m around other people, I use a facade. Normally it is incredibly difficult for anyone to break through this facade. With a couple exceptions, those who have seen the inside of me go on to date me, because I show it to so few people that when I do show it to you, it means you’re someone special.

But when I’m alone, there is no facade. I’m just me, in all my silly quirky glory. I sing (LOUDLY) to good music in the car. I dance around the house. I laugh a lot. I’m not afraid to cry at sappy movies (or occasionally TV shows.) I pretend I’m the star of American Idol. I play video games and eat junk food and just relax. This is the kind of stuff I do when I’m truly happy, yet 99% of the time I do it in front of no one, simply because I don’t trust myself to let all that out in front of others. You see, I want to be known as someone amazingly successful. And for whatever reason, I have it in my head that really successful people probably don’t sing Sophie Ellis Bextor songs into a hairbrush while getting dressed in the morning. Still, that is me at least as much as anything defined as “successful” is. So I wear a mask when I’m out. Oh, don’t get me wrong…it’s a friendly mask, and when I say I’m genuinely interested in something, I am. So it’s not fake. It’s just a layer of protection, much like a coat and scarf would protect me from the cold.

When people see the real me, the true me, they are amazed. I see it in their eyes. I know why, too. It’s because I totally open up and become a different person. No longer am I self-restrained. No longer am I worried about success. I’m silly and I make people laugh. I have a good time with things. But then it disappears again, submerged in the serious side of me, and this is when things go wrong. The people who have seen that side of me don’t want to see me let it go. They try to pull it back out. Of course that doesn’t work, and I just run further away… because no amount of begging or coercing will bring that side of me out. It only comes out when I’m truly comfortable with both the person and the situation.

So why couldn’t I bring it out with S? Easy. He is just like me. I can’t bring that side out because it would be dangerous. He would have every tool in his arsenal available to hurt me, and he would know exactly what to say to damage me, perhaps permanently. Oh, I don’t think he would hurt me. But I can’t risk it. So I put the coat and scarf on, and become Serious Erica. Only I can’t hold the Serious Erica facade for too long….it exhausts me. So I start to break down, and as I break down, I become more frustrated. As it continues, I feel things inside me start to snap, and I get really aggressive with other people (much as a cornered animal would.) Once I can have that time to myself to re-balance, I can feel things mending. In fact, tonight, as soon as I dropped S off at the airport (he came here from his San Diego vacation on Sunday… only about 55 hours ago), I put some 80’s music on in my car and realized I could sing out loud without feeling like a complete idiot, and did so. My bad mood went away pretty much immediately.

So what are the lessons from this? Many of you would tell me to be “myself” more often, but I’m sorry–it doesn’t work that easily. That side of me is quite fragile and gets its heart broken easily. If I revealed it more often, there would be that many more chances for me to get hurt. So I will continue to reveal it only to a very few select people. (And no, you absolutely cannot force it out of me. That will only make me withdraw more.) The lesson I feel I’ve learned is that I need that “me time” to recuperate after being around people, and when I don’t get it, I become a really nasty person. I also need to be more proactive in telling people that I need to be alone when I can feel things starting to snap, instead of trying to push through it (darn willpower!)

My heart tells me it’s time to reveal itself and help out a friend this week, so I will follow it. This is always difficult for me, but in this case, I feel it’s important. Wish me luck.

Score: California citizens 1, Governator 0.

Yours truly,
-Erica

P.S. That receipt that you printed out at the register after I bought my last pint — WHICH IS ALREADY GONE — yesterday… you know, that coupon for 75 cents off two more pints of your heavenly goodness? Yeah, that one. That was just evil.

Hey Josh, are you going to un-friend me now? hehehe!

“Blow my whistle, bitch!! Blow it like you mean it!” Haha, one day I was playing that song in my car (it’s on one of my infamous incredibly long and fun dance mix CDs) and willfe said “This is a great song! [long pause as he listens to the lyrics] Holy shit, are they talking about… in that song? I totally didn’t even get that!” I just died laughing. I had to rewind it and play it again for him. I will never forget that day. One of my all-time favorite moments. I imagine you are gettin’ plenty of whistle-blowin’ now! !!

I guess for me it’s a trust issue. If you won’t trust me with your last name, why should I bother telling you anything about me?