Let there be sight! (I can see clearly now)

I've dug out a monitor from the dawn of computing which will help to no end in seeing what I'm doing here. However while getting it to display was easy enough, giving it something to display seemed to be a bit of a wrestling issue in the end..

LET THERE BE SIGHT!

I'm spoiled for choice when it comes to monitor options for Garage Intelligence, with either a dusty old Acer from way back when I believe I picked up yonks ago from a car boot sale...or nothing. And so the Acer got another turn at life although it took a little rooting around in the parts box to find what I needed to become one with the rest of the machine.

The Acer monitor has a VGA and DVI out. The K2000 Nvidia Quadro however has a DVI out and a pair of very old school HDMI ports (the one with the square edge on one side). So naturally a DVI to DVI cable would be the most ideal option.

And of course I don't have one of those. 

I do have this odd HDMI to DVI short cord however it's the next generation of HDMI which means it doesn't fit into the K2000. 

Which leaves VGA to VGA on the motherboard, bypassing the GPU entirely and finding something else to use like this: 

Yes it's a VGA to DVI converter from the time of 90's PC case beige and currently how I get the K2000 to talk to the Acer. The converter connects to the K2000 and the VGA to it, the other part of that lead into the monitor. I'm sure someone will come along soon enough and point out that there's a vision quality loss in that mix somewhere but at least now it's working, provided you don't breathe anywhere near the setup because on a couple of occasions my monitor went drunk.

Go home connection, you're drunk!

Unlike me at a work event the drunkenness is fixed with just another strong breath and I suddenly found
at the exciting 'finally we can install the OS here.'

And that's where the problems began, Garage Intelligence suddenly turning into a U2 song.

NO IT WASN'T SUNDAY BLOODY SUNDAY

Or even Bullet the Blue Sky for that matter. I'm referring instead to their lesser know 'Stuck in a moment (That you can't get out of)' as Windows copied itself onto my drive and then proceeded to completely forget that it had and tried doing it over and over and over again until I intervened. 

On a positive note it seems my three SSD's are up and running and once I cleaned off all the existing partitions and other stuff they were ready to rock and roll: 

Given the small size of AtomOS Drive 0 seemed the logical choice and it happily installed a version of itself there. Then it got to the part where it needed to restart itself, so it did and ultimately wound back right at the same place again - asking me which drive I wanted to install Windows on, even though Disk 0 clearly had the partitions and files set up for Windows now. Resetting the PC and pulling out the bootable USB before it posted gave me the 'I can't find things boss!' 

This is a first in all of my OS installs. Usually it's clever enough to go 'Oh wait, I've already done that first bit haven't I?' but this one was clueless. I even installed things a second time just in case it might something vital (like a brain) in the first go. 

Long story short it seems with this installer you need to have the USB assigned as the first boot drive in your Bios, your SSD the second. Then as soon as it reboots, pull the USB so it has to select your SSD instead. Normally I'd wander off and make a coffee but Garage Intelligence really wanted me to hang around!
 From there it started to load windows, reset itself once more and then fully loaded windows. 

Then once it got there, it proceeded to install the Matrix right there in front of me.

I'm not even going to pretend I know what's happening here, I can only assume that it's AtomOS unpacking itself or perhaps packing up things I don't need or want. Things moved a touch too quick for me to comprehend and I figured 'Well it's doing something so that's a win!' Even if that win took me back in time.

Probably a good time to stock up on Bitcoin while I'm here!

Still a top win though because after five minutes of eradicating Agent Smith from my system, I had a fresh new install to play with. 

Now there's still a bit of fine tuning to do here before I get to grips with checking all my drives and bits to see if they're worth still hoarding or not and that's namely getting it to recognize both the K2000 and the Asus WiFi card, both it's calling generic names. I'm sure that's just a simple process of finding the drivers somewhere, hoping they still exist in a dusty repository somewhere online.

Also where is the shutdown button here? It's going walkabout. I either have to Alt+F4 or hit my arcade button to turn things off. It's a minor thing but maybe there's an option to restore it? A.I will probably know. But I'll cross that bridge soon enough - for the time being the machine works and isn't stuck in a loop so that's a super pleasing start to things ultimately!