It’s been a rough few days for me on the computer front. Over three years ago now I built my primary desktop for home (see this post). It’s worked really well over time except that’s it was extremely loud which led to me (just recently) deciding to try to address the situation. I bought and replaced the fans on the system to quieter ones and that helped. I next targeted the power supply which is where things went awry.

I got a Rosewill power supply for it and ended up plugging it into the motherboard incorrectly which led to a fried motherboard. Fun. It took a while to make the call though to say it was officially dead. I’m fairly experienced on the software side but not so much on the hardware front. In the end, I decided to build or purchase a new machine as it was due for an upgrade anyway. I looked around on NewEgg for a while–an amazing and highly recommended site for computer equipment–and gave up on the building idea after a bit because I just had had enough of it for now. In the end, my wife came up with the idea of checking out our local Fry’s store to see what they had already built.  

I ended up buying an HP Pavilion m7690n. It’s a nice system overall and at a great price, even compared to what I gathered during my brief search targeting at building it myself again.

Unfortunately, this didn’t mark the end of my troubles. The HP came with Windows Media Center pre-installed. They don’t provide the actual installation discs, instead, they provide an application that allows you to create a set of recovery discs yourself. The problem is that I’m guessing those are using some sort of reimaging system and not the actual Windows install process. I really wanted to wipe it completely though as it came with a ton of software on it that’s basically crap plus I wanted to make the machine a part of my domain-based network. I found a way to trick MCE into allowing it to join a domain (MCE 2005 by default disables this feature) that looked fairly straightforward. So I figured I’d try it and manually uninstall the plethora of unwanted software on the machine so I could keep a clean install of Media Center on the machine but have it join the domain. This is where things got a bit more complicated.

Tricking it into joining a domain required using a Windows install CD to go into the ‘recovery console’. So I got an old XP setup disc and gave it a shot. Unfortunately, I’d blue screen after a couple of minutes or so. The blue screen (Windows STOP) error was:

STOP: 0x0000007b (0xF78D2524, 0xc0000034, 0×00000000, 0×00000000)

I found a few sites that talked about this blue screen here (search for 0x0000007b) and here. These helped a bit but weren’t really addressing the actual problem I was experiencing in the end. I then was talking to a friend of mine (thanks Dan!) who said he had experienced a similar problem last time he build a machine with SATA discs and suggested I find the drivers for mine (found here for future reference), put them on a floppy, and do the F6 thing during Windows Setup to provide it the appropriate drivers to work with my drives. I ended up taking his advice but since my machine doesn’t have a floppy it meant I had to dig up my old 120mhz Pentium from way back (I knew there was a reason why I keep my old machines), stripped the 3.5″ floppy from it and connected it to my new machine. After a while, I finally got it to work just fine though it was pretty frustrating overall.

I even spoke to (chatted online actually) HP’s support at 4am the first night to see if they had seen this problem before but it proved to be futile. They told me they didn’t recommend (or support actually) “upgrading the OS” on their machines and instead I should use what came on it. He was nice though and tried to help but all he could suggest was to “FDISK the machine” as that will probably “fix it.” So this is why I’m posting this to maybe save a few hours of frustration for anyone who goes out and buys an m7690n and finds they need to hit the good old recovery console.

On the bright side, I did try Vista on the new machine and it worked fantastically well (install went smooth as can be). It’s the first time all of it’s performance scores were five or higher. I didn’t leave it on as I only have Vista RC2 discs at home and one of the applications I use a lot (Steinberg Cubase and an MI4 sound card) don’t yet work on Vista well so I needed XP.

The rest of this post is primarily for me (and anyone else in this situation) for future reference so I don’t have to spend as much time finding the correct links for drivers, etc.

HP Pavilion m7690n Specs
ASUS P5BW-LA (Basswood) Motherboard Specs
Intel Raid/ACHI Drivers
Realtek HD Audio Drivers
Intel 92562V 10/100 Network Drivers (wired)
NVidia GeForce 7600 GT Graphics Drivers
Lite-On (Atheros) Wireless Network Driver (still searching)

I’ll update this post as I find more relevant information as I’ve learned from experience that I’ll be needing to come back to this post (as I did last time I posted about my new machine) on many occasions.