So I bought a 400GB Seagate 7200.10 SATA drive. "Great," says me, "This should work fine."

So I take apart my machine, reorganize all the disks, refold the cables, clean off all the contacts and unwire and rewire everything.

Power up, life is good. Wait, no it isn't. My SATA controller won't find the drive, and Windows refuses to detect any SATA drives while it's plugged in.

So I look around, and on the package it says "SATA/300." I vaguely remember one of my old geezer professors (am I an old geezer now?) complaining about how he had to go through hoops to get "SATA II" to work, so I wonder if this is the same thing. I immediately hit Wikipedia.

Wikipedia tells me I might need a firmware upgrade because my VIA chipset is too stupid to autonegotiate. So I go and get all the Asus upgrades and all the VIA upgrades and the like. Still won't work. In fact, it's worse.

So I go and I poke around in desperation -- turns out I need to pop a jumper on there to force it to "stupid" mode. So I go and I look around for jumpers. Nope, don't have one. Finally find one in the bottom of my drawer.

That jumper's awful big, so I have to jam it on there. Works. So I rebuild my machine for the third time tonight, power it up, and life is good. Now I have over a terabyte of disk on my desktop.

I remember when I got my first 200MB external drive and I swore up and down that I would never, ever fill up that much.

I broke my Wifi antenna's coaxial too. [crying]