Almost There...

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The days when my exclusive use of a PC are drawing to a close, even as the days of Mac ownership grow ever more imminent.

First off, I'm not an idiot. I have been in the trenches battling computer problems for nigh unto 15 years now and though I'm not certified (maybe certifiably insane) in anything, I have taught myself everything I've needed to solve arcane conundrums involving the software and hardware issues that plague these complex machines. I've served in college as the resident computer consultant, even though I was only responsible for connecting people to the campus network and troubleshooting problems that interrupted their connections. It was during this period that I developed a severe disdain bordering on outright hatred at Compaq Presarios. To this day, I have a dim view of anyone being hailed as an impresario simply because one brand has forever soured my perspective on that word.

I've served, as many of us "computer-savvy" individuals have, as the family go-to tech support person for various and sundry technological ailings- from computers to DVD players to TVs. So imagine my confusion when Windows refused to recognize a new hard drive as anything but "removable storage" Drive J. I've certainly installed hard drives before and partitioned them, but never have I encountered a problem so easy to fix that was exacerbated, nay, caused by an inexcusable design flaw which essentially gave the user NO useful way to circumvent a common problem (in Windows). Be patient, dear Reader, and you will hear the tale of my sorrow.

The Problem. Today I purchased a 320gb hard drive (I got a really good deal) for my parent's computer so we can do VHS- DVD video editing. I installed it, played with jumper settings, and then called tech support. I was told by tech support to physically switch where the drives were located so the EIDE cable would be correct (master on the end of the cable, motherboard on the other, slave drive in the middle in case you were wondering), and had to manually select my boot device several times (F8 at the bootup procedure) before I could even get into Windows. A PC defaulting to DOS doesn't phase me- it's done that too many times for me to care.

Here's where I was struck at the utter stupidity of Windows. In Windows, you have to go to Start, Settings, Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management, Disk Management to see your hard drives and partition them. I'd been there several times with the tech on the phone and we couldn't figure out why the new hard drive was uninitialized, unallocated space of 0 bytes. Not good. While waiting for the tech to look up more information, I performed several Google searches on this problem to no avail. The tech then told me to swap drives, etc. etc. as described above. Nothing worked. I was escalated to senior tech support (whose accent was less noticeable I might add) and he proceeded to tell me to do exactly what I had already done (set jumper on Western Digital to slave instead of Cable Select- long story, don't go there...). I told him how I was looking at how Disk Management was telling me that the drive was uninitialized and I started clicking around the interface, looking in vain for a "START USING HARD DRIVE" button or something. I accidentally happened to right-clicked the grey box (incidentally, with Windows everything is grey unless you have that stupid default Fisher-Price look with blue and green) with the drive and the "!" uninitialized icon. What do you think should show up, but a context menu whose first option was "Initialize". Then everything was peachy- I partitioned the drive in half (160 gigs each), then partitioned the second 160 in half again (80 each).

On a Mac, I'm sure the OS would have recognized the drive, and asked whether you wanted to format it or not, or format it itself while serving you lemonade and doing your dishes, right? Sigh... Stupid Windows! Such a waste of time...

Anyway, I'm waiting for the drive to parition now while checking out prices on Apple.com. Hey, it can't hurt to look right?
 
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17 inch 2 GHz C2D imac (5,1) with 3GB DDR2 RAM, X1600 (128MB memory) GPU - OSX 10.6.3
That is a nice story. And a nice read. And to be honest that's the main reason I am not a windows fan. I can do 95% of what my mac can do. But it just takes twice as much effort to do so.

And OS X will just recognise the HD automatically. And with bootcamp assistant or disk utility you can partition it as you see fit. But it seems you know this already. Anyways good luck with OS X.
 

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