Build my pc .... labor of love or hate

[Bastiaan]

I think thats the reason that they (pc stores) demand to install the cpu for you (otherwise you loose your warrenty) without extra charge (here in the Netherlands. The only problem you have is that a mobo with installed cpu and fan wont fit back in the box, so you have to go home with a box that has a weird humb on it... [img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

[Bastiaan]

I will know quite soon if i have it still in me. My dad (78 years old, gotta love the guy... [img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img] ) wants a new pc, and i am going to build it for him. On monday he will be the proud owner of a pc with amd Duron 1200 on an Asus Asrock K7vt266 with a 40 gb seagate barracuda with 256 MB ram....

I think he will like the setup. The system he has now is a pII 133 Mhz or something... [img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

[Kevin Genus]

Well, I got everything working ... been working for a while. One thing I did do was add a 100g drive for backup, so the last couple of hours I've been moving files around and waiting for defrag to finish.

For those of you who haven't seen this link, www.tweakxp.com had some pretty cool regedits that had my box rockin'. One of my projects had 25gig of valid playlist material that moved pretty quick, well, much faster than what I'm use to.

Anyway, one cool thing was the IRQ usage on the A7V333. I don't know what it's like on the rest of the boxes out there, but my 001 got set to IRQ 17.

I'll do the Davec Test tonight or tomorrow and get the results up.

[zedhed]

Enjoy the journey!

[Kevin Genus]

At the beginning of the week, after reading all the comments about "under $1000" I opted to rebuild my box and get some results.... The purpose of this topic is to let you all know what happened.......

[Kevin Genus]

Wednesday night, I hopped in the pimp wagon, trucked out eastern snow and ended up at CompUSA. This proved to be the biggest mistake I could have made. I bought a 100g hd and an A7V333. I figured I had built enough PCs to know that it's easy... Went home took my current machine apart.

Thursday morning, got online and ordered a rack mount Maxtop case (all they had was white so I'm stuck with that .... oh well my studio now has that multi-racial look, "not that there's anything wrong with that!").

Thursday night, damn near peed my pants waiting for the gear to arrive, so got out the Chapman Stick and played for a while.

Friday, stayed home from work ... repeat stayed home from work!! Testing out my other CPU, I started to smell smoke ... pissed as hell. I figured I had let my current 2100 not bind well to the thermal guard. Well, FedEx showed up at 5:08pm (could've gone to work) as I was calling in an MIA report.

I assembled everything with the 2800 Barton, turned it on, and smelled more smoke. 2 cpus, fried. At this point, I stomped around cursing my head off. Luckily, it was Sat. at 12:38am and CompUSA was closed, otherwise I would be writing from Jail right now.

I called CompUSA Sat at 10:08am and spoke with the phone guy. Somewhere in the conversation I heard the phrase, "Gee mister, we don't take back motherboards." Somewhere in the conversation he heard, "I tell you what ... I'm coming down right now, and you better have a policeman ready for what is about to happen." Unfortunately, I get compared to a certain person who helled Vanilla Ice out the window from a hotel room balcony.

So, I guess maybe God looked through the clouds and deemed it necessary for my father to go with me .... people think he's the old guy from National Geographic Aboriginal photos. We walk in, I asked for Robert Mitchell (yeah, I'm putting his real name here). He came out, took one look and said, "Listen, I'm not going to put you through any more hard times, 'I' think the board is defective, we'll just swap it out and call it even." Meanwhile, I'm thinking, what about my dam* cpus ($750 bucks shot .... that's a TM103), but he pretty much said to call in and get them replaced (note to self ALWAYS BUY RETAIL CPUS).

I promptly left the store with the added hip walk feeling ego rush over me, then went straight to the mom and pop computer store down the road and asked if they would be kind enough to install the CPU. Now, I go there so much and do this all the time, the guy just looked and said, "You quit your job? We'll still hire you man..." At which point I had to explain all you have just read. I wanted to make sure I was out of the picture lest I have to return to CompUSA and go directly to jail.

Anyway, I'm at home now, putting the cards in... it's 3:31PM EST. We'll see how this otherwise meaningless saga continues.

Word to the wise. If you've never built a computer and you are wondering if you buy INTEL or AMD. Think about this ... in 10 seconds, if you do not have the AMD cpu properly connected, you will fry your mb and cpu. INTEL is more forgiving in this respect. I was fortunate, my board was defective. If you don't know, don't learn on an AMD. Times are changing, hardware will get better, you'll know the second time around, right? Anyway, .02 cents for someone who may need it.

-g