Maybe I’m out of touch with the news lately, but has anyone heard of the Earth Hour? This morning I had thought Google changed their home-page to adopt the Blackle idea, however that was not the case. Apparently there is a goal to have as many people as possible turn off their lights from 8:00PM-9:00PM in their local timezone to help raise awareness of worldwide energy conservation. I commend the idea and will do my part to support the awareness, however it may have been a better idea on Google’s part to have this message+countdown on their homepage earlier this week (so more people would be aware). I could be wrong.., but I feel there will be more people who will miss this message as it’s the weekend, not everyone may visit Google on a daily basis, and so on.

Anyhow, I support the idea and I do hope others will take part. When and if most people turn off the lights for 1 hour, I just hope it doesn’t have a significant impact (stress) on the powerplant when suddenly everything comes back on

Today I received a lot of goodies in the mail. A brand new MSI motherboard, AMD Dual Core 3800+ Processor, 250GB SATA Hard Drive, 2GB DDR ram, 256 nVidia 7600 GT graphics card, and a bunch of other stuff. It was time to build a good performing system to replace my old system I built in 2001.

Tonight I did a fresh install of the Windows Vista Business Operating System on the primary 250GB Maxtor Hard Drive. Everything was running smoothly until I encountered another problem with Windows Vista. After shutting down the computer to install my old 160GB PATA Hard Drive (transfer files), Windows Vista would no longer boot. Instead I am left with a nice “Non-system disk or disk error” message. Now you may be asking if I had set the jumper settings correctly, or the boot sequence in BIOS…well of course!

I then figured it would be best to return to the original way I had everything set up, so I removed the old Hard Drive…no luck. So what to do next? I threw in the Windows Vista install CD and selected the “repair” feature after booting off of the CD. The repair feature instantly recognized that the master boot record was damaged, and it fixed the problem accordingly. After a fresh restart, Windows Vista booted fine.

Now I still needed to get my old Application Data files off of the old hard drive, so I reconnected the hard drive to the motherboard and yet again, “Non-system disk or disk error” JUST GREAT! Yet again, I had to throw in the Vista install CD to repair the master boot record, and now my computer boots fine with both hard drives connected.

I have never experienced a problem like this when i was running Windows XP, or the earlier versions of Windows, as I have moved hard drives around in the past. So in conclusion, if you ever need to throw in another hard drive while you are running Windows Vista, you might experience a problem similar to this. Just giving you a heads up.

I’m not too worried about it, but today I encountered my first Windows Vista problem. About 30 minutes before writing this blog entry, I restarted my computer and suddenly things went wrong. First off, it took about 10 minutes just to get to the login screen. Secondly, I noticed that my screens resolution was a dreaded 800×600, when normally it was 1280×1024.

Right off the bat I had a good idea that something was up with my graphics card. So I went into the Windows Device Manager and guess what…the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro graphics card is experiencing aborted I/O operations because of either a thread exit or an application request. What does that mean?? Well I really have no clue as I have never experienced that type of problem before..

So my best bet would be to uninstall the current drivers for the graphics card, and install the latest drivers from ATI’s web site. However, as I said in the first sentence of this blog entry, I am not too worried about it. The ATI Radeon 9700 Pro is a pretty outdated graphics card, and to my left are three boxes which include a brand new PCI Express graphics card, 430 Watt Power Supply, and a new MSI 915GM Speedster motherboard. Tomorrow I will be throwing all the new parts together along with re-installing the Windows Vista operating system.

Lets hope I do not encounter a problem like that again…