Something that Works

While most of what passes for intelligent comment on this blog is in the nature of complaints about the stupid way that some things seem to be designed not to work, it seems only fair that I record a recent positive experience.

I have commented on the spectacular hardware failure saga below. What I was left with during the repair period was a hard disk with the OS installed, and a video card.

Ordinarily with microsoft operating systems if you swap a hard disk from one machine to another, windows, to put it politely, shits itself. If it boots at all you get regular blue screens and no peripherals will work.

However, this hard disk had windows 7 installed on it. I thought to myself, what the hell I'll try and plug it into another motherboard. I already had a spare machine so I dragged the new machine's case over to the old machine. I ran the power cables from the new machine to the motherboard on the old machine. The SATA data cables were run between the motherboard in the old case to the disks bolted into the new case.

On firing the machine up I was stunned, nay astonished, to discover that against all previous experience windows did not shit itself.

Instead the OS loaded up drivers for the changed wireless card, and sound card and started working perfectly well.

The only problem was with fucking stupid DRM in iTunes. Despite purchasing upgrades to DRM free mp3 files as and when they become available I still have several protected files in my iTunes database. Of course iTunes thinks I have copied the files to a shiny new machine. This is despite the actual physical files on the disk being identical. iTunes says new motherboard and CPU = new machine so you have to re-authorise the files. Of course because of the catastrophic failure of the new board, that means I have to use up one of my 5 authorised machines.

All my other software, including Steam games, worked fine.

So, thumbs up to windows 7. It doesn't shit itself if you swap motherboards. They can put that on the box.

Of course, linux is perfectly happy to run on whatever machines you throw it at (even from a USB key) as long as you enable the appropriate kernel parameters. Which stuff like Ubuntu does by default.