IDE Card - Day Last

Well, I gave up today. I'm anxious to get started on the actual server work, and I'm tired of messing with hardware. I installed the 250GB drive in my desktop machine, and I will soon move the 80GB drive to the server.

The IDE Card goes into my drawer of computer parts. Maybe I'll use it in a later project. Or, I could sell it on eBay.

A weird thing happened when I brought up the new drive. I didn't notice it until I was installing Firefox, and it was asking to install on the E: drive. I had wired the 250GB drive as the master and the 80GB as the slave, but the 80GB retained its old drive letter of C:. The machine boots from E: just fine. (I know - the drive letter is assigned long after boot starts.) I wonder what will happen when I take the 80GB drive out (in about 15 minutes) and reboot. Will the 250GB drive remain at E:, or grab C: once it is not in use? I suppose it isn't a big deal, but it is a little non-standard. I'll read up on the subject.

Once again, I have to install loads of desktop software. For those of you who care, here's the checklist (always being augmented as I remember things):

• Windows Update (took three reboots!)
• Zone Alarm
• McAfee Anti-Virus (free from work)
• Firefox
• Thunderbird (I hope that I can import all of the settings from version 0.8 into 0.9.)
• MS Office XP (I need it for work)
• Nist
• Epson 785EPX Driver
• PuTTy
• Windows Media Player
• Real Jukebox (v 2.0 - before Real One)
• Canon Camera Utilities and Software
• Acrobat reader
• ATI Video Drivers
• Hosts file
• Mad Dog soundcard driver
• WinZip
• WS-FTP
• WinMX
• VNC
• Other Web Plugins as they come up

UPDATE: After I finished writing this post, including adding all of the links, I pressed 'Publish Post' and waited. After the Blogger message indicating a successful upload didn't come up, I decided on a whim to copy the text and paste it into a blank notepad window. Good thing I did, because the Blogger server failed and the text was lost. I would have been quite upset if I had lost it all.