Just ordered me a steak and some baby shrimp here at Harbor Inn. Waiting on our food to arrive with two little monkeys.

Happy 11th birthday Russell.

Check out Jake’s homework from tonight. He is 6 and has better handwriting than I do.

Sub-project #83 is complete. I got the coated MDF cut and installed today to complete the finish work on the dishwasher compartment. It turned out pretty good. I even got the trim installed. Of course Michelle doesn’t like the trim I put up and she wants it redone. I guess that will be Kitchen Project (Subproject 83.1).

Take a look at this heat sink. It is from a friend’s PC. He brought it to me because it wouldn’t start up. It turned out to be a bad power supply and you can just imagine how it looked as well after seeing this pic.

Clean your machine!

Jake got his 2nd Nine Weeks report card yesterday.  He did good again in all his classes.  Congrats Jake!

Reading     85

Language Arts     89

Math     93

Social Studies     89

Science     86

In an interest to add some new content to the Scarborough Family site I am going to start adding some tech-type content to my posts.  I really don’t plan to make these posts to technical in nature (since I am not that technical) nor do I plan to make them a review of a product.  I merely plan to use these posts as a share point of my experiences, and hopefully they will be entertaining and enlightening.

With that being stated, let’s start on the first post.

I recently purchased all the pieces for a new gaming PC and have finally got it all put together and installed the Win7 Professional 64bit OS.  There were several quirks about this OS installation procedure that I haven’t noticed prior to this.

When I started the install (I was previously running the machine with the Win7 Pro 64bit RC) it went thru the normal loading of setup files after booting from the CD.  I wanted to do a format of my C: because I always like to start with a clean disk when re-installing a Windows OS.  That all went pretty normally except when I selected the drive that I just formatted I kept getting an error message that said:

Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition…

Well after a little searching I found the problem.  You obviously cannot have more than 1 physical drive attached to your system when installing Win7.  I unplugged the second drive and booted the PC back up…that is when all hell broke loose.  I hit the power button to turn it on and I heard a pop, a sizzle and then nothing.  The PC wouldn’t do anything.

I felt like my first puppy had just been killed in front of me.  My heart sank into my ass and my mouth dried up like I had just smoker half a bag of chronic.  I immediately started to panic.  Of course, that is when Jake decided to come in my room and see what I was doing.  Surprisingly, I maintained my calm and asked him to give me a few minutes.

Anyway, I unplugged all connections and starting investigating.  I found nothing, no burnt spots, no smoke smell, absolutely nothing.  Whew!  Then I realized that I had forgotten to unplug the other end of the frickin SATA cable from the mobo.  Now all the panic welled up in me anew.

I unplugged the cable and put the machine back together and luckily it booted up with no problems!  Now, I could get back to the original point of the exercise, which was to re-install the OS.  Once I had that other drive disconnected the install went without a hitch.  I was sitting on the desktop ready to install my security software (AVG Internet Security) within 30 minutes.  Amazing.  It was super-fast and easy to do, once I got past the problem with the drive.

Windows 7 was my idea, but I definitely didn’t ask for install problems with multiple HDD installed.

Stay tuned for the next episode when I detail my horrors with Win7 and getting an iPhone to connect!!!!

Check out this pretty little girl at dance class. Once we finally get her there she has a blast.

Katie did her skips and spins all by herself tonight. She didn’t need any help from the teacher.

Good Job, Baby Girl!!!!

Kids on the new 4 wheeler in the front yard.

Check out Jake’s homework for tonight. Not only did he have to write the sentences, he had to think of them using his spelling words. Wow! I didn’t do that until Garrett. Haha