I felt better today. I still didn't have much of an appetite. I had a South Beach Diet protein bar before I left for work. Around 11:30 AM I had a Clif bar, and mid afternoon I snacked on probably about 1/3 cup of Krema peanuts. (Thanks Greta!) When I got home I still wasn't too hungry and just had a few crackers with some brie cheese. Sheri had to work late and didn't get home until after 8 PM, and she brought be a double cheeseburger from McDonalds. That's it.

I was running a fever again last night, but it was less than Sunday night. Last night it was only 100.9º. I went to bed really early and slept mostly through the night, so I felt fairly well rested today.

I still don't have a PC at work, so I sat at my boss's desk for a couple hours first thing in the morning and tried to do a few things. An outside programmer that has written a couple web apps for us was scheduled to come in around 11 AM and do some things, so when I got there I had to turn the PC over to him and I pretty much just watched over his shoulder the rest of the day and asked questions. I learned a few things.

Recall that Sheri picked up that $39 after rebates hard drive on Sunday when I wasn't feeling well. Because Sheri had to work late I figured this would be the perfect time to cause a mess in our office and install it, or at least crack the case and make sure I had an open bay, open power connectors, etc. to install it some other night.

The first challenge was opening the case. It turned out to be hinged on one side and it doesn't actually come apart. It is like a clam shell. I saw the little release tab on top, and pressing it kind of made it come apart a little bit, but it took some fiddling to find out there was another release tab on the bottom. Once I found that it just sprung right open.

I spent some time reading the instructions and getting familiar with the layout of the inside of the PC. One thing that impressed me with Dell is that even though it only came with one hard drive, they included additional rails that are needed to install additional hard drives down the road. There were several of them clipped to one side of the case. I just snapped them off, screwed them into the side of the new hard drive, and slid the drive into an open bay.

The ribbon cable that came with the Dell originally had the two connectors too close to each other at the end that it made it impossible to plug in the new drive. Lucky for me the new drive came with a longer cable and that had the two plugs at the end spaced further apart.

I buttoned it all back up, plugged everything back in, and turned it on. I got an error message that said I did not plug in the power cable to the video card. The video card would not even let the system boot up. It just stopped everything and displayed that warning in big red letters.

Crap. OK. I probably just jiggled one of the power cables loose. I will open it back up, make sure all of the connections are secure, and then try it again.

Nope. Same message. I feel my forehead getting a little dampened, but no full fledged panic yet. I opened the case, rechecked cables a few times, but got the same error each time.

I figured I must have damaged a solder connection somewhere by accident. I thought the worst case scenario is I will have to go out and buy a new video card. Couple hundred bucks. Not what I wanted to do, but certainly not a catastrophe.

I opened it one more time and just kept following the power cable to see if I could spot any signs of damage. I don't know how I missed it, but the cable that came from the video card, snaked its way around a couple places, was not plugged into anything. I could immediately feel a big sense of relief. OK, not to figure out where it was supposed to plug into. I assumed it went right into the power supply, but it didn't. The dangling plug was just sort of hidden behind the power supply. The plug was supposed to plug into another plug coming from another set of power cables.

I did not unplug it, so the only thing I can figure is when my PC was built two years ago the person that assembled it did not push hard enough to snap the connectors together, and when I opened it up tonight there was just enough force to cause the two to come apart without me noticing. Whew!

After I plugged that back in the PC booted like a charm. I loaded the configuration software and it mapped it to a new drive letter, portioned it, and I am ready to go.

If it wasn't for the video card power cable problem it would have been a piece of cake installation. I have never done one before, but I would have no qualms about doing one again in the future.

In the new world of digital photography you can never have too much hard drive space. If/when I ever get my Canon EOS 20D camera with its 8 mega pixel sensor I will really be eating up disk space.