Strange Requests

If you're going to buy a component for a computer, please research before you wander in and make yourself look like an idiot. It is not possible to "take SATA drivers out of the BIOS" in order to install XP on a machine that previously had Vista. Two reasons why: 1) The BIOS does not have any drivers that you can remove, and 2) Anybody who claims to have done such a thing is fibbing.

The user in question now wants a motherboard in Socket 775 in Pci-Ex with two PATA ports on it. The scary thing is they only have two IDE devices and a SATA hard drive. Quite WHY they need two IDE ports will probably never be explained, even though the machine was only three weeks old and now they want to replace the board... Sometimes it's just not worth asking.

Strange requests go with the terrority - "I got a computer, it's all screwed up, yes you can probably wipe it but I need all my data and I need all my programs." When asked as to what they do with the system the standard reply is they haven't a clue what they use to do anything. Couldn't even find out what they were doing - "bits and bobs". Apparently I'm supposed to know what they're doing with their computer.

The other strange request of the day was the computer user who wants a power supply simply for running a graphics card. It was a six year old Dell machine with unique wiring from the PSU. The user wanted to run a juice-hungry 9600 series graphics card (one of those that feeds from the six/eight pin connector) purely from a power supply on the outside of the case, and feed the rest of the system with the built-in PSU that's uniquelly wired on the PSU and the board that's non-standard.

For the unitiated most power supplies have a need for a minimum load, otherwise they'll either not work at all, work ineffectively or worse, burn themselves out. I refused to condone such behaviour, perhaps understandably.