I had a don’t believe this moment while at a client’s today. A number of surplus PC’s had been donated for re-use by the client. It had already taken several weeks to get to the point where I could boot from the Windows CD and re-install the operating system as every avenue to select an alternate boot device had been protected by a BIOS password which the previous owner didn’t think to supply, that now in hand I triumphantly installed XP SP1.

All was wonderful until I noticed the lack of Network drivers and without these I couldn’t get any where near the net to find some. Now, not only a missing BIOS supervisor password but no Motherboard Driver CD either! This left me needing to identify the motherboard somehow in order to get them – and as will become apparent, other drivers. I quickly found a utility called CPU-Z which would not only do the job but also didn’t need to be installed either; how to get it across to the island of XP?

No problem, USB stick, nope, USB drivers also not available. Now what? Ah! The 3.5″ floppy drive. Rifled around in my bag and unearthed my old box of disks and proceeded to download the software and cut it to floppy disk. Nope, ended up trying 5 different disks which it complained about for a variety of reasons, so that route was dead too. What next?

That left only the CD-ROM drive, which meant I had to return to base, download the utility and cut it to CD there and on return, lo and behold It finally recognised the bloody CD and I was able to run the utility and discover an INTEL DG945SS mobo. Which just leaves the fun of downloading those drivers and cutting those to CD. Once they’re on I’ll have net and USB access …. maybe!