Like, dude.
(and there's much gloating going on here. Be warned.)
Oh, and to be formal about this, let's call it Marius' ROTD 6/9/02. It's only kind of a rant, but let's not let THAT trivial detail stop us.
So it's been this really crazy couple of days. Our story begins Friday night at, oh, close to midnight, anyway. The EPoD had been vanquished, turned in, and class was over, except finals on Monday and Tuesday, and checkout Wednesday. Something like 3 hours worth of time over 3 days. Oh, and a 5 page paper on this guy's statement that *giggle* "American history is the march of progress of equality and freedom." applied to the colonial period. Yeah, no problem.
So I'm waiting for one of Morrowind's 5 minute cell loads again, thinking "yknow, I should just move back and commute in for the finals. I could pack during these damn cell loads." And the cell continued to load. And I shrugged, and decided hey, why not? So I started packing things while I waited. And then played until it lagged. And then loaded more stuff. About 2am it was all done.
So of course, being the self-respecting night owl I am, I started moving it to the car. At 4:30 or so, I finally decided that enough was enough, stopped, and crashed on the bed, which at this point had no sheets because I had packed them.
Morning's plan: Pack the other half with the aid of a cart (computers up 3 flights of stairs suck).
Well, morning can start at noon, I guess. Get cart, pack stuff, return cart. Except the guy who gave me the cart wasn't bloody THERE, so I had to wait for like an hour. That really sucked. But I lived, and got the hell out of there.
And came home to my real reason for leaving, which was sitting on the doorstep: My Lian Li PC-61 computer case, which was the final component of my system upgrade.
So what did I do? Unpack, put everything away, and then work on the computer like, say, my parents would have done?
God no. I'm a geek. Of COURSE I didn't PUT THINGS AWAY. There was a computer to be put together! I did, in passing, unload it all, though...
Keep in mind, folks, that I've never built a computer before. It's all been store bought before. Dad distrusts building one's own. Dad also distrusts Windows XP. Notice that I ignored him on both counts... (Well, hey, he only worked with computers for like 30 years. Why SHOULD I listen to him? )
So, at the advice of the friend I had sitting there online to help me (I have a group of friends who invest everything they have into completely kickass computers on a regular basis. *shrug*), I started the motherboard preassembly. Got the CPU in ("why the hell won't the locking lever go down!?"), got the RAM in ("What are these black plastic things on there? Oh, heat spreaders you say? Right. Now come on you little ****, GO IN!"), got the CPU fan in (big sucker. Like 2 inches on a side. Took amazing amounts of skill with a screwdriver to get the clips on.).
Then it became time to actually INSTALL THE MOTHERBOARD. (M:I theme plays) This involved the pushing of little metal spacer things through holes, and then screwing them down. No problem, right? Well, there are like 20 holes in the case for them, and about 10 holes on the MB for screws. See where this is going? Yeah. So I got to play around with trying to guess which holes did what while moving the MB around in the depths of the case. And it sucked. And I said to the world at large, "There must be an easier way."
And there was.
A glance at the case instructions revealed that...*gasp*...I could TAKE THE MOTHERBOARD BAY OUT OF THE CASE BY UNDOING FOUR THUMBSCREWS. Who EVER would have thought such a thing? Wow. MB assembled inside of 5 minutes. Woohoo.
Then it got REALLY fun. Those of you who have done this will testify that there are a LOT of little cables that hook up to the motherboard. Cables from (count them) both front case fans, the top case fan, the rear case fan, the CPU fan, some random fan on the MB itself, not to mention the power supply, the power and reset buttons, the power, reset, and hard drive LEDs, the speaker, and the USB connectors on the case.
This bears a slight aside. My new case, bless it, has four USB connectors sitting in the front of the case. The motherboard itself has two built in (yknow the two by the mouse? Yeah) and has a little thing that goes in the card bay if you want two more. So I've got eight total here, right? The motherboard has room on it for FOUR of these, counting the two built in ones. There was much amusement. Right up until the part where you realize that you gotta connect each little wire on each USB connector to a pin on the motherboard. There are a total of 8 of these, and they're not much bigger than the wire. And you gotta do it JUST RIGHT. Yech.
Then came the plugging in of sound, video, etc cards. No problem, except my fan count increased by one since my GeForce 2 Ultra has it's own fan (remember I'm coming from a 1998-vintage P500 here, folks). I've got miles of little wires stretching everywhere, and I haven't even got to the power supply wires and data ribbon cables yet.
There was a break somewhere in here to go eat something, since it was getting on like 8 at night by this point.
Mounting the drives was no problem at all, although getting them out... Well, my old Micron case is a marvel of evil. To get the one hard drive out, I was forced to remove the faceplate and remove four inch long screws, then dig around for the two plastic clips holding it in. The second hard drive required physical removal of that portion of the drive bay to get out when after unscrewing it it wouldn't come out. Turns out there were these HOOKS in the other side. Yeesh. The floppy wasn't budging for anything, until I noticed that there were metal clips holding it in place. So I'm trying to get those undone, it's not working. Turns out the REAL clips are on the BOTTOM of the drive. Sheesh.
And have you ever tried removing a power cable from a drive? My lord. *holds up a 3/4 foot-long pair of pliers*
Installation in new case? No problem. Take off both case sides and front, which have thumbscrews holding them on. Screw in CD drives easily. Remove 3/5" bay, held in by thumbscrews, and screw in floppy and both HDs. Whole process takes maybe 10 minutes.
And then came time for the power cables. So I undid the little tie thing holding said power cables in the top of the case, only to be confronted by the mother of all power cables. I mean, wow. There's like 4 seperate chains of cables, with a total of like 15 connectors. MASSIVE overkill. I was actually running into problems trying to move all that cable out of my way so I could get the data cables in. Ye gods.
After a couple more minor details, it was then time to Turn The Computer On.
And I pushed the button.
*beep*
Monitor comes on, startup stuff starts scrolling by. I leap into the BIOS to change something my friend seemed to think I needed to change to make my Soundblaster work. It's not there, but whatever. Exit BIOS. But wait, I forgot to stick the Windows XP CD in the drive! Reboot.
*red reboot light comes on*
*beep, crankcrankcrank*
*fans whir around loudly in the proverbial dead silence*
Ruh-roh. Something's wrong.
Friend: Yeah, if you power on and off 4 times, it'll reset.
*pressing of button ensues, about 10 times. Nothing happens other than the lights and fan whirring bit*
Ruh-roh. Something's still wrong.
Ah, but it says in the destructions that if you reset the CMOS jumper, it'll fix itself! *does this*
*pressing of power button*
*light comes on. Fan whirs. Fan continues whirring. Fan does lots of whirring but nothing happens.*
Ruh-roh. It's STILL wrong.
Friend: Maybe you've got a short somewhere.
Say, there's a thought. There WAS that one spacer I put in (remember that part? That's 6 hours ago by now). After much Entertainment With Screwdrivers, it's out.
*button pressage*
*fans start whirring*
*light comes on*
*beep*
*monitor comes on, displaying text*
Woohoo! And I remember to stick the XP CD in!
And as the XP installation came up, I suddenly realized I forgot to format the drive. But XP should let me do that, right? We shall see. No, apparently, it doesn't think so, or if it does, they hide it well. No problem, I've got a Win98 boot disk here with format on it. Muahahaha.
Meanwhile, after I mentioned that XP setup is looking for the damn previous install of Windows, and not finding it despite Win98's existance on the still unwiped drive, my friend, who apparently has no experience with Upgrade versions of Windows, is sitting around laughing, telling me that I'm screwed. Whatever.
Reboot, format drive, lalalala, done this a hundred times, lalalala. Reboot again. Do I want CD-ROM support?
*Cartman voice* Yes I want CD-ROM support! (y'all who've done this know what I'm talking about)
Lalalala, I shall now go to the CD drive and enter setup, lalalalala. *typing*
[This program cannot be run from DOS.]
Ruh-roh.
Well, I can reboot after taking out the boot floppy, and it'll work, right?
Computer: Well, no, actually, I don't feel like doing that today. So I'll flash system disk errors at you until you go away.
Argh. *fighting with computer ensues*
Computer: Well, since you've just done the same thing you just did 500 times previously again, and since 501 IS the magic number, I guess we'll let it work this time.
*XP setup pops up*
*XP setup magically sets itself up, taking care of everything, including hardware installation (remember sitting there with zillions of driver disks?) as Marius gapes in awe at it*
XP: Oh, damn. Forgot the printer. Feed me a disk, would you?
*Marius numbly feeds the computer a disk*
XP: Thanks. All I needed, really. You're all good now.
*Marius gapes in awe*
For those of us who never had the pleasure of setting up Win95/98, it used to go something like this. You'd format the drive, stick in a boot disk, stick the install CD in, install Windows, and it would then sit around at first boot asking you for driver disks for the 10 or so things you needed to hook up. Which meant finding a zillion driver disks in whichever box you stuck them in. XP? XP just DID it. Didn't ask, just DID it. Oh baby.
And back in the bad old days of Win98, you used to have to wrestle with video settings, which sometimes didn't work so well. I've left a P133 lying there gasping in pain, stuck in 640x480 at 16 colors, wrong drivers, you name it. XP's only problem appeared to be that I was running at some wierd refresh rate, which made the screen blink and bounce like an insane acrobat on speed. Change this, pop it into 1024x768 at max colors, no problem. Used to take hours to fix that.
So by the time I get this far, it's like 3:30 in the morning, and I'm really tired, but can't stop now... Made it as far as getting email up and running and Trillian installed before crashing.
So I fed it the rest of the disks today, and had a couple few hours budgeted for it. Took half an hour. Compy just zips through installs now. I'm amazed. Only ran into two programs it couldn't handle, and I fixed one of those easily.
Now for the part where I massively gloat.
This is, without a doubt, the sweetest, slickest, coolest piece of hardware it has ever been my priviledge to own. Its better than my old P500 ever dreamed of being, and my P500 was the best thing there was when I got it, and cost somewhere in the multiple thousands range.
And now, using a whole three (3) things from my P500, I'm running the following:
AMD Athlon 1800+ (1.53 Ghz) - up from a Pentium III 500
512 MB DDR RAM - up from 128 MB of 4 year old stuff
80 GB of hard disk (original 20 GB with a 60 I got for Xmas)
24x/10x/40x CD-RW (another Xmas upgrade)
DVD drive, one of the bits of stock eq
SB Live!, another bit of stock eq
GeForce2 Ultra, which I got a couple months back
3Com 10/100 NIC, another bit of stock eq
Abit KX7 motherboard (up from stock thing)
Lian Li PC-61 aluminum case, up from the POS steel Micron case
And in gaming, the new comp just blows the hell out of the old comp, which you would expect, but to see it do so... Whoa. I LOVE that feeling.
And did I mention that this is the coolest case EVER? Yes, I'm drooling over the bloody CASE. I mean, it LOOKS cool, being black aluminum. You can remove BOTH the sides, EASILY (Micron POS took massive force). Not only that, you can remove the 3.5" drive bay, AND the entire motherboard/card bay. Talk about ease of maintenance. Oh, and it's got a zillion fans, yet is actually quieter than my P500 which had a whole TWO fans.
I'm in heaven. Yes. Yes I am. Woohoo!
And if anybody made it this far, thanks for making it through this gratuitous bit of self indulgence I mislabeled as a rant.
*scrolls through preview*
That was pretty long, wasn't it? Ah well.
Posted by Dwip at June 9, 2002 10:59 PM