{"id":5919,"date":"2014-03-17T00:01:26","date_gmt":"2014-03-17T07:01:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=5919"},"modified":"2014-03-15T18:05:39","modified_gmt":"2014-03-16T01:05:39","slug":"say-hello-to-enzo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=5919","title":{"rendered":"Say “Hello” to Enzo"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, my faithful PC Monster X<\/em> took a dive. His USB circuitry wouldn’t recognize the mouse or keyboard, effectively ending his very productive lifespan.
\n
\nMonster X was a Dell XPS computer I bought back in 2008. At the time, he was truly a monster: oversized tower with a 750W power supply, 4GB of RAM, 500GB hard drive, plus an Intel Core Duo. That was top-of-the-line at the time.<\/p>\n

Over the years, Monster X had his issues: I’ve replaced the hard drive twice, added another optical drive, and upgraded the graphics card. As a behemoth tower PC, he was fully able to handle all the upgrades, which is why I chose that large-scale tower PC design.<\/p>\n

I had scheduled a replacement for Monster X sometime this year. He would have turned 6 in April, which is about as long as I want to keep a computer. But then his USB interface dropped dead, so he was retired earlier and replaced by a new box, which I’ve named Enzo<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Enzo was made locally — a “Mom & Pop” system. I prefer to buy local because of the better support: Should Enzo have any issues, I just drive him over to the shop (about a mile away) and they’ll fix him. That’s far more convenient than buying a computer at a Big Box store, where you can’t even return the thing.<\/p>\n

I amped up Enzo as much as I could: He has a fast i7 processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 500GB hard drive. I could have opted for the 120GB SSD, which is faster, but I tend to fill up hard drives so that wasn’t a consideration — for now.<\/p>\n

Once I got Enzo home, my first task was to perform transplant surgery with Monster X’s GeForce GTX 680. That hefty expansion card barely fit inside Enzo’s case. In fact, I had to remove the hard drive to get the card inserted. But it fits and it works.<\/p>\n

Next step was to restore my personal files. Fortunately, Monster X had an external hard drive (hint-hint) and it ran Windows Backup every week (hint-hint), so I lost no files.<\/p>\n

Let me repeat that: I lost no files<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Backup is so<\/em> vital, I can’t express it enough! Not all the files restored, however: For some stupid reason, Windows Backup doesn’t copy files not found in the traditional Windows pre-created folders. So I had to transplant Monster X’s hard drive into Enzo, copy over the rest of the files (mostly programming stuff) and then I was done.<\/p>\n

The final step is reinstalling programs. That was pretty easy because most of them are downloads. The rest I have the original optical discs. Oh, and I have all the registration numbers and keys, so everything worked smoothly — except for Microsoft Office 2013. Microsoft refused to let me re-install because the user key had already been used. So I phoned them up for a manual authorization.<\/p>\n

I’ve never manually authorized a Microsoft product before, but it was about as painful as an appendectomy using a can opener. I’ll probably rant about that process in detail in a later blog post.<\/p>\n

The end result: Enzo is up and running. I’m happy. I’m back in business. That’s the way it should be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Acquiring a new PC should be a celebration. Should be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[15,17],"class_list":["post-5919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main","tag-pc","tag-troubleshooting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5919"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5919\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5933,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5919\/revisions\/5933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}