So photoshop cs5 is just around the corner – mid-May (like the nebulous late-April shipping date for the iPad I ordered) so I thought I'd upgrade my Dell Precision T7400 from 32-bit Windows XP to 64-bit Windows 7 in order to take advantage of the 64-bit, quad-core processor capabilities of CS5 and leverage the 4 GB of RAM I have in the machine – possibly adding more (it will go up to 128 GB of RAM but I'm don't think my budget will).
I'd been putting this off for some time as XP to 7 requires a ‘clean install'. In other words, all my programs would be erased and I'd have to reload them, one by one, then download all the myriad of updates off the web – a lot of non-productive time. The upside is I can leave all the stuff I'm not using behind, but that's really not that much of an upside, hence the procrastination.
Well, on the 23rd I made the plunge, went over to OfficeMax and bought a copy of Windows 7 Professional (Pro has to be better, right?) and for fun, Office 2007 Professional also. I launched into the upgrade full of energy around 9:00 am on the 23rd by using the Windows Easy Transfer tool to copy all my data files off my OS partition and onto an external drive. This was about 266 GB of data. I don't know who writes the time estimate portions of these transfer programs but their algorithms are over optimistic or maybe the marketing guys get involved. Either way, a one-hour transfer time slowly crept up to 5 hours before creeping down, the whole transfer taking 9 hours. Something I'd advise be done overnight for anyone else considering this.
Next came the 64-bit Windows 7 install. Put the DVD in the drive, reboot the machine from the DVD, follow the prompts and 35 minutes later I had Windows 7 on my machine. Cool. So Windows 7 has been out for a while so let's run Windows Update to get the latest package. Oh, did I mention that the 23rd was also the day we switched over from Comcast to ATT U-Verse? That was also not without problems but was done much faster so I just had to set up the new wireless connection – straight forward, done.
Apple hide all their flaw corrections in iTune updates. who doesn't want to take iTunes update? Microsoft just frustrate everyone with their stream of patches and bug fixes. Just another way where Apple's style creates demand. But I digress. I downloaded some updates and Whammo!, Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). Restart, BSOD. Restart, install another update, BSOD. And so on, and so on, ad nauseum for about 18 hours of effort.
During those 18 hours I had googled and binged (but did not yahoo) the “Stop: 0x00000124” error message and found lots of leads (from people with very strange user names) but no clear answers – the error message just refers to a hardware failure. Some people reported nVidia graphics card driver issues others had sound issues, most were game related. I tried the easier solutions and got suckered into parting with about $60 for utilities – the scans are free and of course they find problems. The fixes require you pay. These seemed to work at first soI was not overly unhappy with my investment as the time between BSODs grew to 40 minutes but then they came back and the intervals got shorter once more.
During this period I had run the diagnostics and found an error on my DVD drive. I took the machine apart, disconnected and reconnected the DVD drive and the error went away but the BSODs kept returning. My head hurt. A lot! Finally, having been badgered by my wife for several hours to ‘call Dell', I finally did.
Now I have, all in, six Dells in the house. Five were purchased under an employee purchase discount from a former employee but my T7400 was purchased under Dell's Small Business Program where I ended up having followed the discount link from the NAPP Member web site. But my account on the Dell website links to the Employee Discount services line. At about 11:00 pm on Saturday night, I called the 1-877 number and got to Pamela. She was very courteous, took my machine reference number and then, “Oh”. “What?” “This machine is with the gold team” (I think it was gold, it might have been something else but I was thinking I was about to get sent somewhere else). Sure enough, I got sent elsewhere where I listened to muzak and Dell commercials for a while before Clay answered the phone. Clay took my details (again) and then “Oh”. “What?” “This machine is with the Small Business Department, I'll transfer you.” Now Clay did give me a great deal of information, including how to get to that department directly in the future, but he still transferred me.
This time the phone rang but once before Josh came on the line. Josh took my details, again. Josh listened to my story, which I was pretty confident with now, this being the third retelling in 20 minutes, and chastised me for downloading the utilities I had downloaded to fix the problem. Josh calmly told me to erase my OS partition and reinstall Windows 7. He'd call me back in about 40 minutes for the next step. I re-installed Windows 7 and 40 minutes later, just after midnight, Josh did indeed call back. OK, let's put some drivers on there. Navigate to the website. “Let's try remote control so I can look at your machine directly”, says Josh. Download the application go to install and BSOD. It's back. The error message was always started with the same, “Stop: 0x00000124” with some slight variations after that.
Restart, lets try to get the drivers a different way, downloaded two, was downloading the third when, BSOD. Let's restart and run diagnostics. No hard drive found, error with optical drive. Let's take the side panel off and disconnect the optical drive. Rerun the diagnostics, no hard drive found. Let's swap hard drives 0 and 1. No hard drives found. Lets just try hard drive 0, not found. Let's try hard drive 1 connected to port for hard drive 0, no hard drive found. Josh called it at about 12:30 am on Sunday morning – mother board failure. In the myriad of support forums I'd browsed in the preceeding 24 hours, I'd seen mother board reduced to MOBO. So my MOBO was giving me BSODs. I recall at least one post I'd read where someone else had had to replace their MOBO to stop their BSODs. So now what?
Josh ordered a replacement MOBO under my warranty. It'll ship to the repair dude overnight on Monday so the repair dude is supposed to call me on Tuesday to set up an appointment to replace the MOBO on Wednesday or Thursday. The MOBO is the green board at the back of the image below – essentially it's most of the machine!
Now I'd been planning to use a utitlity called ZinstallXP7 which claims to elmininate the need to re-install all the software but with the multiple times I've installed Windows 7 and the elimination and recreation of the OS partition, I doubt that will work. Will still give it a go, though, after all, worst case is reinstalling all the software.
In the interim, I'm back on my five-year-old Dell E1705 laptop and, in the course of writing this post, the battery on this machine has reported a total failure. Do I buy a new battery or buy a new laptop? Still waiting for my iPad so I'll wait a while before deciding. In the meantime, I'll cover up the annoying, orange-blinking battery warning light.
