For the past couple of days I have been helping my father with his computer upgrade. With a new motherboard, processor, hard disk, DIMMs, graphics card, sound card, and network card, it’s in fact closer to building a computer from scratch. This has been standard practice for all family PCs in the past. However, I had important hardware compatibility problems when I built a machine for myself two years ago. It required a month’s effort to get the machine working (what with ordering generally unavailable motherboard and graphics card replacements) which left me utterly drained. Since then I decided to only opt for ready-made PCs: my next upgrade was my VAIO. Now I am experiencing the same problems with my father’s machine.

Neal Stephenson (of Cryptonomicon fame) wrote an essay (In the Beginning was the Command Line) where he draws parallels between the computer and auto industries. People don’t build their own cars anymore. PCs have reached such a degree of complexity that putting parts together is not sufficient. The combination of parts needs to be fine tuned, workarounds for incompatibility issues must be applied, BIOS settings need to be optimised. The whole is in fact less than the parts, unless you know what you are doing, in which case you are either a l33t h4×0r, or a technician for a PC company. It is getting harder and harder to know what you are doing. Hardware manufacturers now commonly release 0.x and beta drivers written in a hurry. It is more likely than not that a PC put together with the newest components will not work. A PC, as a conglomeration of hardware and sofware, becomes an unpredictable chaotic system. This realisation gives me an easy, albeit not very comforting answer when my father asks “Why does it crash?”

Anyway, the problem seemed to be bad Windows 98 drivers for the GeForce 2. It was solved by installing Windows 2000 Professional. More money for Microsoft.