TO HELL AND BACK

Dick Pountain/17 June 2001/Idealog 83

My favourite line from 'The Godfather' comes when Al Pacino tells his associates that 'today I took care of all the family's business'. Well, I feel like that right now: I just took care of all my PC business and moved myself firmly into the late 20th century (no sense in getting too far ahead). I retired my old Windows 95 desktop system for good and am now running two Win2K systems, one on the desktop and the other my old Thinkpad upgraded from NT4 to 2000. The reasons for this sudden violent outburst of tech activity had nothing to do with the supposed superiority of Win2K but everything to do with practicality - I need some working USB ports (impossible under either 95 or NT4) and I needed to access AOL on the move from the laptop.

So how did the conversion go? Well, like riding a roller-coaster in a thunderstorm on bad acid, that's how, but at the end of it all I truly feel it was a growth experience... The only thing that helped me keep my sanity at all was my new best friend, Norton Ghost, and the knowledge that every time things went really rotten, I could just restore a working NT system from CD-R.

It all started out deceptively simply when I chose to upgrade, rather than replace, an existing NT4 installation on my new laptop to 2000 and it appeared to work first time without a hitch. It was only later that I discovered its serial port was now only working intermittently, even though all the OS utilities and diagnostics said it was present, visible and OK. I performed a clean install of W2K onto a different partition and discovered the serial port worked just fine from that, so I blitzed the first installation and did another clean install. That makes three on Day One.

The next day I tried to upgrade the Thinkpad's NT4, only to have the install end in a Fatal Error following the first reboot. A trawl through the MS Knowledgbase said this means that W2K wasn't recognizing the CD-ROM drive. (This despite the fact that a PC Pro colleague has the same model 600X, bought in the same month, and his upgraded like clockwork). The cure for that was to restore NT and then copy the i386 directory from the W2K CD onto the hard disk and install from there. That worked fine so I had two working Win2K machines. Now to install Laplink to get what I needed over from the retiring 95 system. Unfortunately I chose to install Laplink Professional from the PC Pro cover disk without reading the small print (not 2000 compatible) and that broke my installation in the most delightful way, namely that it would boot all the way to logon, but then the keyboard froze to prevent entering the password. Of course the fix for that is to restart in Safe Mode. Er, what's this, a blue Stop Error screen? Boot to Last Known Good configuration - ah, that's better, a *black* Stop Error screen. Another reinstall fixed that, and then Laplink Gold (which is 2000 compatible) installed nicely after only one further boot failure that was cured by upgrading my video drivers from the ATI Web site (don't even ask).

By Day Three I could tackle the next important step, which was to get my external HP CD Writer working on both machines. Now I already knew that the Adaptec Easy CD and Direct CD software supplied with this unit is as touchy as a manic-depressive cobra. This is the only software that has ever caused blue screen death on my NT system, and it was even capable on rare occasions of an almost miraculous failure mode where everything freezes except the Task Manager which nevertheless shows only 2% CPU usage. So I meticulously scoured the Roxio site for the very latest drivers and obtained a software upgrade to Easy CD 4.05 from HP (£24, not a bad deal). That should do it. This time I discovered a wholly new type of boot failure, more exciting even than a Stop Error, where it hangs in the white Windows 2000 screen, the progress bar stops moving (for hours, I checked) and even the power button doesn't work. The odd thing about this one is that it went away by itself, in installments, without any further driver upgrades: repeatedly rebooting with the aid of a bent paperclip (this was the ThinkPad) got first the SCSI card, then the CD-R drive working. I like this, it's sort of organic, like a wounded creature slowly healing itself.

It was at this point that I realized that not only did I now (on Day Five) have two perfectly working systems, but that I was now seriously addicted to the Win2K installation process. It's like white-water rafting, or rock climbing, or bungee jumping: the pounding of the heart, the roaring in the ears, the red spots floating in front of your eyes. Good job I'm already on lisinopril 10mg pd. When I lived in New York in 1970 a baseball jacket popular among Vietnam vets bore the inscription 'When I die I'm going to Heaven 'cos I've served my time in Hell'. But they were conscripted...

Now that I've rejoined the mainstream of OS users, I actually quite like it. The Windows 2000 interface is better in many subtle ways, and I love the new Wacom Graphire tablet that having a USB port enabled me to buy. And after all it's only cost me five days of my life, which is only worth, let's say £1000. Now to get them networked.