About 15 years ago I put together computers for sale as a way of supplementing income while in University. There were only a very few pre-built PCs available (unless you went to IBM), many a  box was hand-built by somebody like me. The problem was always new hardware and the new software they introduced into the system ... the device drivers. It was a beast putting together these systems at times as you searched for something that might allow things to work.

The trick was, of course, to not use cutting edge equipment but it is often the cutting edge equipment that is the sexy thing you wanted. Also, it seems reasonable that if you are going to purchase something new that will be obsolete long before it stops working you should get the fastest, best system you can. Unfortunately, at the time, the latest CPU required the latest motherboard which might not be compatible with the otherwise fine graphics card (or any other subsystem).You had to physically work with almost every device from printer ports to mice; even extending RAM was often an ordeal (the BIOSes of the day didn't know what to do with RAM above 640kb).

A new machine using the latest and greatest hardware running whatever Windows variant existed (mostly 3.1 or 95) could swallow up 12 hours or more as various web sites, bulletin boards, and the beginnings of social networks like Usenet were scoured looking for the right driver or configuration tweak, or J-pin to short. Each device would almost always require "the latest" driver because things were mostly non-standard and everything changed rapidly.

A few weeks ago I found myself putting together a computer for a friend's daughter, not a new one but re-purposing an older P4 duo-core box. I spent about 4 hours (wall-clock) reinitializing the box back to a pristine Windows XP Pro SP3 system, removing unwanted hardware, and making it safe and secure (anti-virus and spybot). I found it odd but XP couldn't find drivers for any of the two ethernet controllers but then I remembered the on-board had failed more than a year ago and the TP-Link add-on required a specific driver back then. No worries, got that driver on a CD already, popped it in and the rest was just a bunch of clicking and waiting. This is much better than I had remembered, everything had greatly improved. Well, almost everything.

I needed to get the files off her dead laptop and that required some specialized equipment  (a desktop computer's power supply will blow up a laptop hard drive) and so I went to visit my friend Scott who has all the cool toys. He took the laptop drive out, hooked it up to an USB adapter and plugged it into my running computer. That allowed me to save the 7.7GB of files and so I went home to transfer these files off of my Linux box and onto the new windows box ... no concern of virus under Linux but big time concern for the Windows, I knew the files were heavily infected (over 100 different viruses in the end). As the copying process (which took well over an hour because of virus checking) was just about to conclude the machine stopped ... no blue screen of death, but a black screen of doom.

Clearly something wasn't happy but I'll cut a long story short and say that because there was no life to be found I correctly conclude the mother board was toast. I just spent at a minimum 6 hours of my time so that I could stare at a black screen and listen to fans spin. But this is 2010, I thought, I should be able to just put the working hard drive into another computer and let the system figure out the changes ... none of the hardware was cutting edge and is was generic PC hardware.

The problem was that the new computer was a Dell and the broken computer was a generic knockoff and everything including the CPU and all peripherals was different ... and proprietary. The machine booted, found all the hard drives, figured out that the CPU had changed and so wanted to re-activate ... but no network available. No network? The Dell onboard ethernet port wasn't recognized by XP, huh?

Unlike the other machine, I knew there was nothing wrong with this port, definitely a driver thing, but how can that be that a fully enabled XP SP3 system doesn't know about an onboard ethernet adapter? Ubuntu has no problems with it, and certainly the chipset is standard but no go. Thankfully I had the drivers on another box (Dell ships with C:\DELL) and once I'd transferred the files (thank goodness for USB sticks) that got things going. But there was nothing easy about this, had I not had all the knowledge from 15 years ago I imagine I'd have been forced to pay somebody to fix it and I bet they'd do so by destroying what was there :-)

 This whole experience was so similar to two decades ago I almost felt I was in a time-warp. I am forced to conclude that running a computer remains a task that requires a lot of knowledge when things go wrong.