Some years ago our dodgy narcissist boss “acquired” a load of kit from an equally dodgy supplier. We reckoned they were shipping customer’s RMAs to other customers without testing anything, hoping the next customer would not notice or figure out the problem. Something must have got mixed up with this scheme and we ended up with two large boxes of random kit meant for someone else.
Two items were motherboards, for the time two higher end “workstation” branded ones that had EVERYTHING. It’s been a while now so I don’t remember what exactly, but at least 6 SATA ports over two controllers, dual gigabit LAN, two or three PCI-E 16x as well as the usual stuff you would expect. Well beyond anything a lowly high street computer shop had seen before.
Almost salivating, boss whips out the pirated XP CD.
And its fucked. Half a dozen drivers refuse to install. Even one of the NICs, identical to the working one. No matter what we try they end up with the yellow triangle “!” warning in device manager.
Ah well. It is a dodgy RMA return. Let’s try the other one.
Infuriatingly for the boss, this one has exactly the same problem. Exactly the same devices with the same errors.
He wants his freebies so bad, he’s incensed that they both fail in the same way because it smells like a solveable problem, not a defect or damage that could be explained for one or the other.
Bit of background on boss. He stumbled into IT, never really had any plan to get into it and certainly not for the joy of it. It pays the bills. He mocked me and the other staff for our comptia and Microsoft certifications because he never needed all that pompous book learning and he runs his own business.
I have a look at it. Device manager is complaining about “not enough resources” or something to that effect. Thinking back to my A+ and the tedious memorising of IRQs I give it a go myself.
On the motherboard that has EVERYTHING, I disable Almost Everything in the BIOS. The second SATA controller, the NICs, audio, serial, parallel, every single feature unnecessary beyond keyboard, monitor, mouse, hard disk and optical drive. XP gets installed again and unsurprisingly every device is installed.
I reboot and enable a NIC. It works. Reboot and enable the second NIC, it works too! I keep going one by one until every device is installed without complaining. That explains why it was RMA’d if the first customers hadn’t tried this. I’m feeling pretty shiny about it.
Boss isn’t impressed. “It’s too complicated, don’t trust it, why do they make everything so hard??”
And that’s the story of the two very expensive motherboards we got completely free that never got used until the business went bankrupt.
(I have no idea if it was IRQs or not, that’s just the hunch I had about them “running out” when XP tried to install everything at once. It could be a fluke or an incorrect guess, but an educated one that was enough to get it working)