My Wife's machine goes VISTA
I have just inadvertently installed Windows Vista on my wife, J9’s, machine. Now this is the machine that I have solemnly promised not to install any Beta version of anything or otherwise mess around with her ‘stuff’. She uses this box for all her Ebay auctions and makes extensive use of the Lexmark 6300 scanner/printer combo. When I ran the Upgrade Advisor it told me that everything would be OK but that I needed to check Lexmark’s site to get the latest Vista drivers.
I had been checking the site for a while with no sign of any new Vista bits, so I was very reluctant to live a month with no ‘desert’ (ahem), as punishment for ruining her machine. So I had decided to bide my time and wait for the good folks at Lexmark to finally come up with driver.
Then I started rebuilding my friend Laurie’s machine. J9 had a spare EIDE hard disk that was not being used for much on her box, so I decided to remove that and add it to Laurie’s. While poking around the motherboard on my beloved’s machine I noticed two SATA connectors. Hmmm…. So after a quick trip to PC World in Truro I come back with two SATA disks and cabling. The plan was to install a RAID 0 disk and put the pagefile on it to improve performance. This is also my flight simulator machine after all.
The BIOS did not recognize the SATA disks – RATS!
So I made the ‘mistake’ of changing two variables at once, first I upgraded the BIOS to see if that worked. At the same time I also found a scrap of paper that had fallen out of one of the SATA disk boxes that said I may in rare circumstances need to set some jumpers for the BIOS to see disks greater than 3Gb. So I set the jumpers and the new BIOS could see the disks! I set up the configuration to be RAID 0 and booted off the EIDE disk to Windows XP. Great!
Windows XP could not see the keyboard, no logon, no mouse no nothing – RATS!
Now J9 was out in Truro spending my salary on something or another – perhaps Christmas presents. So I had a little time to get this sorted out. I decided that as I had in effect an additional hard drive on the box and it was very fast, I would install Windows Vista on that disk array. I could always return to the XP boot and try to figure out the keyboard problem, and still had time to head into Perranporth to buy flowers if that did not work.
The install went flawlessly and took 40 minutes. I also installed Office 2007, J9 would be hours yet after all. Then I started to worry about the Lexmark 6300 printer/scanner.
Windows Vista did not recognize the Lexmark 6300 – RATS!
As I knew that there were no bits on the Lexmark site all I could do was to run the old XP install disk for the Lexmark 6300. I inserted the CD and the autorun started the install.
I had a partially rendered dialog box – RATS!
Just then I heard the front door. J9 was back. All I could do was try again while I prepared my excuses. A miracle! This time the dialog box was intact and went through the entire install. And it all worked. I could print from Office 2007 and scan using Windows Fax and Scan.
‘What are you up to?' She said. I smiled back, I had just saved five quid on flowers after all.
There were a couple of issues – ‘Where are my files’, and ‘Where are my favourites?’. I gave her a link on her desktop to her old ‘My Documents’ folder on the now E: drive and also pointed the indexer at that drive. Then I copied the links from her old favourites folder. Your favourites are just files after all.
Now it’s two weeks after the install and J9 has just burst in gleefully. ‘I have just installed a new Gadget!’ she says.
All part of the plan.
