More Progress

5:50 pm

LED Polarity is truly important. I now have a red HD activity light and a cool blue strip of lights indicating power

6:05 pm

Supper break

6:32 pm

The floppy drive, which I had to enable in the BIOS settings, is working now.

6:45 pm

Having DVD/CD-ROM troubles. I was able to boot from and install XP from CD, but now I can't get any CD-ROM to mount. Audio works fine. Reseating the cable connector didn't help

7:10 pm

Wait! We just got one disk to work. It seems to be erratic.

7:20 pm

Antivirus and Zone Alarm installed. I've only got about 300MB left on the hard drive.

7:23 pm

We're going to try a different DVD/CD-ROM drive

8:00 pm

NCIS Break

9:00 pm

That episode was better than usual

9:20 pm

Both front USB ports work just fine. We are rocking to the sounds of Black Eyed Peas from the MP3 player.

9:38 pm

The other DVD/CD-ROM is working much better (although I wasn't able to watch a DVD. It read the disk, but I apparently don't have a player.) Unfortunately, this drive has no eject button (it's broken off). I can either jab a small screwdriver into the hole until it opens, or use the Eject command in My Computer.

9:58 pm

Once again, I'm tired. More tomorrow