Damn Dell
Monday, January 8th, 2007Over the Holiday BreakChristmas Break I decided to take care of some overdue maintenance on my home PC, a Dell Dimension 8400. The primary system disk (160GB SATA) that had shipped with the PC was consistently showing up in the WinXP Event Log with I/O errors during paging operations. Meanwhile, the primary data disk (250GB SATA) I had retrofitted into the system kept showing up in WinXP Disk Manager as having errors that would go away only to return next time. Several years of accumulated cruft in the WinXP installation was starting to show, suggesting that it was about time for one of those occasions where WinXP just needs to get re-paved.
Now, I’ve done more than my fair share of PC surgeries over the years, yet little did I know what Dell had in store for me… (more…)