It was a dark and stormy night…

naa

It was the best of times….

ack

A long time ago in a….

ugh

Way back when, in a land far away…

(to many of you), we arrived in Shanghai. One of the first things I set out to do was build my mother-in-law a new PC. Her old system was from before the turn of the century and actually wouldn’t run anymore. So I set out on a goal to make it as small as possible and my wife set the goal of making it as cheaply as possible.

Still struggling with the small part, but the cheaply part is just about impossible (however we didn’t know that at the time). We quickly learned that taobao.com was the amazon.com of china. What we didn’t realize is that its a minefield of shady secrets. So I got online in taobao.com and Google translate and started looking for the best price on what I needed. I ordered the following (btw, this is a LONG story):

1. Soyo H61L-M mini-ITX motherboard (17x17cm) ¥201
2. E-mini case (6x19x21cm) ¥65
3. 2x2g DDR3 1333 Ram ¥81
4. Intel I3-2130 CPU ¥150
5. Western Digital WD25000YS Sata HD ¥130

But…

• The E-mini case was supposed to come with a power supply. It did not.
• The Intel CPU never shipped (we got a refund) and it turned out it was broken anyway.
• The seller sent the wrong HD as it was an IDE, not SATA. The seller didn’t want it back and its too big to fit in the case. It sits in the closet. But we did get our money back.

At this point, we got very frustrated and just gave up. I had build a larger computer in America and brought it with us. So I just gave that one to my mother-in-law to use. Over the months, we learned the rules of taobao and got much better at finding good deals from honest sellers and came up with a few rules to follow:

1. Only order from sellers in Shanghai
2. Find the highest rated seller who’s been around the longest.
3. Find the sellers who have actually sold in the past thirty days, the product you are buying (with minimum return rates).
4. Order from sellers with little to no shipping charges.
5. Seller must have full product description and not a lot of junk about other products on their product page.
6. If seller does not ship within 24 hours, cancel the order. Money back from taobao it quicker that way and they probably won’t ship it anyway.

So, recently I decided to try again and put this PC together. Little did I know the trouble and aggravation I was in for.

I took an older external USB drive apart and with a cable adapter plugged it in internally. It sure seemed like it would work at the time. The nutty part is that this HD from Western Digital is actually SATA. It just has a USB board attached for use externally through that interface. The really sad part is there is no way to disable, bypass, remove the USB part and connect directly into the SATA guts.

So, then I took the Intel i5 CPU from my old pc (replacing it with an i7 from America). The CPU fan was too tall to fit in this diminutive case, so I had to hunt around again on taobao for a very low profile CPU fan and a power supply. And this is what I found:

1. CoolMaster H115 CPU fan 17mm ¥29
2. Internal 12V Power Supply ¥55
3. 12V 10 Amp external power brick ¥47

While the internal power supply was not made for my specific case, after a bit of modifications, I made it fit. the CPU fan was just short enough to fit and allow room for the 2.5″ Western Digital USB drive. So I put it all together and powered it up.

Nothing

No video. Nada.

The CPU fan spun, but no video on the screen. I tried re-seating the CPU, check the voltage on the power supplies, swapped memory.

Still nothing. Nada

I spent two days trying to figure out what was wrong. I took a closer look at the motherboard instructions (a single piece of paper, all in Chinese) and discovered that it only supported CPUs up to 65 watts. My Intel I5-3470K was 77w. Crap, crap, crap. Well there was no returning the Motherboard as I’d already had it for a number of months. So off to taobao again to find a better one. Being very careful to find one that supported my CPU and its wattage, I found this one:

1. MSI B75IA-E33 ¥405

We waited two days for the seller to ship…and then cancelled the order. So looked again and found another one at a slightly better price of ¥375, and the selling shipped it within the hour! I was back in business, or so I thought (foolish me).

So I reassembled the PC, plugged it in and powered it up.

Nada. Again! The GODS hate me! That MUST be it.

Only this time, the computer would just cycle on and off every few seconds, and still no video. I tried a different power supply (the one from my old pc). tried removing the HD, removed the RAM, re-seated the CPU.

Still DOA.

How much grief can I endure?

My mind drifts back to a simpler time when I helped my son build a PC. First we bought a turnkey HP from Microcenter. It seemed the best idea at the time – it was not. In less than a day, the memory started having problems and one of the simms went bad. That should never happen, least of all in less than 24 hours of use. So we took it back to Microcenter. At first they would not allow us to return it for refund. They told us we had to buy more memory to replace the bad sim. I threw a fit. Made a big scene and they finally caved. We got our money back and set out to build one from scratch. We still bought everything from Microcenter again, so its not like they lost our business. But this time, we cherry-picked the best components in the price range we could afford. In the end, we had a much better machine for only slightly  more money – and it went together, booted, loaded and updated without a hitch….wish there was a Microcenter here sometimes…

Back To The Present

Lastly, I swapped the memory from my old PC.

VOLA!  It LIVES!

So that super-cheap Kingston memory I bought way back when was fake/defective. ARG!! Too late to return it as well, so another bad purchase. I set out to put a bad review on that seller’s web site only to discover they were no longer in business…wonder why.

Seeing as I had 8GB on the old PC and only really needed 4GB, I split it between the two and everything seemed to hunky-dory. Little did I know…how very little, indeed.

So, my plan was to clone the old Windows 7 HD and put it on the USB drive for the new PC. So I found CloneZilla and Gparted. I needed Gparted as the old HD was 500GB and the USB drive was only 300GB. You can’t clone a partition to another drive unless they are the same size, or the target drive is larger. So I used Gparted to decrease the windows partition on the 500GB HD to 300GB without loosing any data. Then I would load a Linux variant, like Ubuntu or Fedora on my old PC and all would be good. Again, stupidly optimistic.

It took a while (like a day) to create the partition image and then load it onto the USB drive.

But it wouldn’t boot. Said “MBR missing”.

After much head scratching and more research, I discovered that Windows 7 stores the MBR (Master Boot Record) on a hidden partition that is very hard to clone. Then I found out that you really can’t clone Windows 7 to another HD for another computer because the license key it linked to your first PC and would become invalid in the new one.

Back to the drawing board…again.

So, I bought a new copy of Windows 7 – yes, you can still get Windows 7 in China. I read HP is selling Windows 7 PC again in America because everyone hates Windows 8 and PC sales have nose-dived. It’s interesting how one giant company’s misstep can just about kill an entire industry….just say’n.

So I stuck the Windows 7 Install DVD in the external DVD drive, booted to it and got ready to install a fresh new copy of Windows onto this spanking new PC!

NOT!!!

Windows 7 does not install onto USB drives!! At least not officially.

I found that you need to copy the entire Windows 7 DVD to another PC’s hard drive, then add some third party software that mucks with the OS and copies it to your USB drive. With Microsoft WAIK for Windows, USBFast_Installer, and a whole lot of time and patience I got it loaded, installed and running on the USB drive on the new PC.

But there was a problem. Surprised?

Windows 7 won’t create a swap-file on USB drive. Windows 7 just does NOT like USB drives – not at all! So back to the Internet for help. Turns out there is some more, questionable, software that you can load as low-level USB drivers that makes Windows think that your USB drive really isn’t a USB drive. Without a swap-file, Windows locks up and misbehaves if it runs out of RAM. It’s generally a bad idea to not have a swap file.

All is good, right? Wrong!

Somewhere along the way of loading software, applying critical Windows updates and the like, Windows would no longer boot on the USB drive from a cold boot. It goes right into the BIOS setup. When I poked around in there, I saw that the USB drive wasn’t even listed as being connected. Many more hours of digging and I discovered that before when I powered off the PC, the USB still had power (for off-line charging and the like). Now that wasn’t happening anymore. Now, the USB driving was being booted with the BIOS, but was too slow to power up and the BIOS didn’t see it. Without a boot drive, it dropped me right into the BIOS setup. If I did the proverbial three finger salute (ALT+CTRL+DEL) to warm reboot, it booted into Windows just fine because the USB drive was still on. No amount of searching in Windows and BIOS, setting various parameters on the USB controller, or delaying the BIOS boot, fixed the problem. The Inter-tubes was no help as well. So without a clue and nothing else to try, I flashed a new version of the BIOS.

Still no joy.

Surprised? I wasn’t. Not anymore.

So, I’ve finally learned my lesson with Windows 7 and USB: just say ‘NO’.

Now I’ve ordered a real SATA internal HD for new PC for ¥245. It’s just days before Chinese New Year and store are starting to close up. People are leaving town to head back to their villages to be with family. Shanghai is turning into a ghost town. And as my luck would have it, that’s where the people went from the shop I orders the HD from.

Big sigh.

After talking to my nephew, I found out what the little blue vs. grey smiley faces on vendor pages of TaoBao mean: Blue is Online, Gray is Offline. Don’t order stuff from vendors who are Gray as they just ain’t home.

I was hoping to have all this done by Chinese New Year, but two days after that and still no HD shipped, I canceled that order. We jumped on the moped and headed to BuyNow just a few blocks away. There I found a 320GB Western Digital HD for ¥300 (originally ¥350, but we talked them down).

So, I hear you asking: Why didn’t you just buy everything from BuyNow if they’re so close? I hate to haggle. Buying from small local stores (which BuyNow is just a bunch of them), means they will try to charge as much as they can get away with. Being American, they always charge me more. That HD should have been about ¥250, but I was not in the mood to fight for a better price. TaoBao is nice because I buy under a Chinese pseudonym and no one knows I’m not a local chap.

So we hurried home, I shoehorned the HD into the case, put it all together and powered it up.

He likes it! Hey Mikey!

Windows installed without a hitch. The drivers, updates, patches, applications all installed without a hitch. After about a dozen or so reboots to get everything loaded and set up, we had a Frankenbaby PC!

Now back to a life of leisure…at least for now.

You know why they call ‘Now’ the ‘Present’? The past is gone and never to be recouped. The future is uncertain and may never arrive. Now is a Gift. Enjoy it all you can.