I was talking, some small while ago, about how when I get Oblivion in a couple weeks, I would like it not to cause blue flames to shoot out my fan ports when my mostly four year old computer attempts to run it. Fortunately, as that saying goes, we can rebuild it. We have the technology, to the tune of a 3.2 Ghz CPU, 2 GB of RAM, and a 256 MB video card.
I direct you, firstly, to a post from the days of yore, wherein this computer was originally built.
With that firmly in mind, it's amazing how much easier the whole thing is when you know what you're doing. Though there were moments...Open up your computer some time. Locate the power supply. Note how many cables come out of it, connecting to obscure locations in your computer. Imagine taking all of them out.
Now you will understand why, upon removing my old power supply, I grabbed it by the cables, lofted it above my head, and screamed a wordless, primal scream of triumph, as our distant forebearers must once have done, only they wielded spears, and I wield a screwdriver.
In contrast to last time, the motherboard almost put itself together. Took the awesome motherboard tray out, which is one of the reasons I love this case (the other being that it weighs less than I do rather than more), unscrewed the old motherboard, moved a couple clips, put the new one in, connected a bunch of wires and things, and stuck the CPU and fan in, which almost took less effort than it's taking to type this.
I did notice a few things, though, such as how I didn't bother to screw in one of my hard drives to the case, but raiding some screws from an old school Zip drive (remember those?) fixed that. Of course about 5 minutes later I found out that I had about 600 screws sitting around in my box for such things, but oh well.
With a nod to all that USB gloating from times past, let me now note that I have ten, count them ten, USB ports. 4 with the motherboard, 4 attached from the case front, and 2 more because I had a thing with 2 of them that goes in a card slot, and since this thing can only have like 4 cards in it, well. I have no idea what I'll DO with 10 USB ports, but there they are.
Dad: Well, you could always get a USB mouse and keyboard.
Me: Well, I have a USB mouse, but I've gone through how many keyboards? The way oldschool 1996 one from my first computer works just fine.
Dad: *laughs* Yeah, you do seem to kill a lot of keyboards.
keyboard_death_sucks as it were.
So my video card, right? It's a freaking BRICK. It weighs more than the motherboard/CPU/CPU fan combo, even. This leads me to postulate, given the amount of onboard stuff on this motherboard, than given the rate of miniturization and the rate of graphics card advances, it won't be long until our computers are a giant graphics card with a few plug in slots for the CPU and such, and a heat sink/fan the size of your microwave.
Before this thing started, Whir's like "Yeah, you'll have to reinstall Windows." And I'm like "That really sucks. I just did." Come to find out you can just run the recovery wizard thing, and it mostly works. However, there's this really fun part where you get to the login screen, and try to login, and Windows is like "Please activate Windows!" and you say "Ok! Let's do it over the internet! My onboard NIC is plugged in!" Well, no it isn't really, which means Windows won't let you login until you activate, but you can't activate until you install the onboard NIC, leading me to go snag the old plugin NIC from the box of static bags and such, throw it in, activate Windows, and take it out.
But really, when you think about how it used to be back in the bad old days of Win95, that's really not so bad, is it now?
Let me just note to you that CoD2 looks...way better now. Way way better. And RTW? Wow. Just wow.
MOH:PA looks good too, but still crashes right after I saved, so whatever.
But no more blue flame action for me.
Posted by Dwip at February 10, 2006 10:51 AM