11:49 AM
Blogging on another Sunday morning, quite some time since I’ve had time to do this. This is the first of 3 catching up blogs.
I’m in heck. I mean real computer heck right now. Somewhere in early December I had a great idea — refurbish and give my sister’s family my computer and buy a cheap computer then upgrade it on my own to have a really kick ass machine.
I knew I should have known better. I really should have but you know, when an idea hits it hits and I go with it.
I found an amd 1800+ machine with 512 megs of RAM, 40 gig hard drive and DVD on an auction site. The auction was a build to order machine so I had to wait a week from winning the auction to having it arrive here.
I had promised my mom that I’d take presents to my sister in Indianapolis for Christmas. So the week before Christmas I hurried to redo my old machine and get it ready for them. I had problems with it and it didn’t get finished until an hour before I left for her house.
In the meantime I had ordered everything I needed for the bare bones machine. New cd-rw, new speakers, better keyboard, 2nd hard drive and monitor. Some of them gifts from family. It was torture as all the stuff came in while the new computer was … well, that didn’t get here until a couple of hours before I had to go to bed on the night before going to my sister’s house. The sheer torture of the week while all the new stuff got here and the computer wasn’t here yet was something I didn’t want to go through again.
On the way to my sister’s house I realized that I had forgot my laptop and all my clothes in my room at home. Instead of turning back, my sister bought me some new clothes to wear as my xmas present. She let my 4 year old nephew and 7 year old niece pick them out so for a couple of days I was wearing Christmas clothes and scooby doo boxer shorts. Sexy. 🙂
Drove home like a madman on Christmas Eve to see my new computer. Got it put together and got it online and I started to notice things. I mean first, the K7SEM micro ATX motherboard only had 2 pci slots on it. The AGP slot would only take a 4x Nvidia AGP card. These are two things I didn’t know when I bought the system. The modem was on one of the PCI slots and since I needed two for the audio card (the new soundblaster has a daughter board that doesn’t plug into the PCI slot directly, but needs something to rest in), I didn’t know what I was going to do about that but I figured I got a great deal and I’d figure out something.
Problems started when I tried to get the front of the case off. To be honest with you I hated the case. The case itself was a generic ATX case inside the front area where you’d stick the cd/dvd drives in was blocked with metal mounting rails. It also had a removable drive bay for the hard drives but you couldn’t do anything with it until you got the front of the case off. I didn’t know how to do that so I figured out how to get the mounting rails out without taking it off. I gave up for the night after seeing that.
Christmas morning at 6 AM I’m in the process of putting in the cd-rw drive when the front case pops off on it’s own. I start to laugh. But hey, it’s off. I get the cd-rw in, get the 2nd hard drive in and go to boot up. It only recognizes one of the 2 cds and it says floppy drive failure. I check everything and try again. This time it won’t turn on. It gets a brief light on the keyboard when you turn the power on but other than that it’s f*ed. I try removing things. Same thing it’s just not coming on. No tech support on the holiday. No one on so I don’t know what to do so I give up for the day.
Next day can’t get to tech support. I check out Nvidia based cards and pretty much figure out that if I’m going to replace my ATI with a Nvidia card — 4x mind you — that does the same thing — it’s gonna be a lot of money. I finally get tech support and for them to look at it and to help put all the stuff in it’s going to be a lot on shipping and up to 3 weeks to get the machine back.
I sit and I figure out all the problems with the new system. I solve the horrible case by going to colorcases.com and getting a custom case for a good price. I then look around and figure I can get a new motherboard and processor for a lot less money than getting a new video card and having them fix it would take. So late in the week I ordered a K7AMA motherboard with the same processor on it. It has 4 pci slots and will take any agp chip I throw in there. My company offered an employee discount on crucial.com RAM so I got a good deal on RAM for the motherboard and took the time to upgrade the RAM on my laptop.
The plan now is that I’m going to get another case, a dvd, and a hard drive for the now dead new machine this summer. I’ll use it as the machine I take with me on the road. Since there will be next to nothing on it, I won’t worry as much about it. I’m trashing the case that’s for sure.
So as the year winds down, I’m waiting for UPS to deliver to me a new case, motherboard, and cpu. Wish me luck.
Part 2 of this 3 part blog later.
— k9