Upgrading Desktop / British Intl Motorshow
Just the other day when I attempted to switch on my desktop, my desklight went off. The computer never started either; a power surge or something had occured. After running around and having the people restart the tripper two days later (they deemed it non-essential because my main lights were still working, pah I have work to do you know?), I realised that my power supply would not work any longer. So I decided to go online and to purchase a new power supply. 23 quid in a few days, easy peesy.
I received the new PSU soon enough. Remove the cables, attach the new cables, and start. I heard the whirring of fans, but my monitor displayed nothing. Frowning, I left the computer to idle for a bit and upon examination found out that the graphics card was cold. Either the graphics card was dead as well, or part of the motherboard fried together with the PSU.
Deciding that it was time to make the leap to PCI-E from AGP, I set a modest budget of 300 quid to obtain the necessary equipment. I walked out of Tottenham COurt Road with a Pentium D 930 (instead of the popular D 805), a 7900GT (instead of the 7600GT) which remains the white elephant, a SLI - enabled PCI-E motherboard by ASUS, and the unnecessary purchase of the 1GB of DDR2 RAM. Unnecessary because DDR2 is supposed to be backward compatible with the DDR!!!!
Talking with a friend later, he pointed out to me the PCI-E power cord. I swear I had never felt more out of touch with computer technology at that point (forgive me since I have devoted much attention to photography). So I had to buy a power supply which would give me enough juice and the appropriate SLI support, which pushed my budget to double of the initial cost. Bah!
The new Lego bricks.
Expensive Lego bricks they are.
Eventually I got everything fixed and started the computer. Much to my relief it booted and I fiddled with the BIOS setup settings and restarted. Horror, the computer started to reboot everytime it reached the Windows loading screen (you know, the black screen with the Windows logo and the moving bar at the bottom). I could not enter safe mode either.
Therefore, I attempted to use the Windows XP installation CD to repair things. Everything went fine at first, the device driver files were being loaded. Right after that, just before the options to repair/ reinstall/ format HDDs were given, I received a blue screen of death: Error 0x0000007B. Awesome.
Consultations with friends lead me to conclude that the problems I was facing was either: 1) Faulty RAM. 2) I forgot to uninstall and clean my old motherboard files from my HDD 3) My HDDs were goners.
It doesn't appear to be #1 because I returned the RAM and got a new one from a different batch, but the problems persist. I therefore spent another 50 pounds on a new HDD which should arrive soon; hopefully Windows will install onto it and that I can rescue 20GB or so of my pictures. Sigh.
----------------
Oh, I visited the British International Motorshow at the Docklands. It was great, lots of awesome cars and the works. However I am in no mood to post a detailed entry with pictures etc, because I extremely pissed off at the fact that I lost my CF card with half the pictures that I took. Thankfully the 2GB is still around and I still have some awesome pictures. But the pictures of the Maybach concept car etc etc are gone. Bloody hell!!
I received the new PSU soon enough. Remove the cables, attach the new cables, and start. I heard the whirring of fans, but my monitor displayed nothing. Frowning, I left the computer to idle for a bit and upon examination found out that the graphics card was cold. Either the graphics card was dead as well, or part of the motherboard fried together with the PSU.
Deciding that it was time to make the leap to PCI-E from AGP, I set a modest budget of 300 quid to obtain the necessary equipment. I walked out of Tottenham COurt Road with a Pentium D 930 (instead of the popular D 805), a 7900GT (instead of the 7600GT) which remains the white elephant, a SLI - enabled PCI-E motherboard by ASUS, and the unnecessary purchase of the 1GB of DDR2 RAM. Unnecessary because DDR2 is supposed to be backward compatible with the DDR!!!!
Talking with a friend later, he pointed out to me the PCI-E power cord. I swear I had never felt more out of touch with computer technology at that point (forgive me since I have devoted much attention to photography). So I had to buy a power supply which would give me enough juice and the appropriate SLI support, which pushed my budget to double of the initial cost. Bah!
The new Lego bricks.
Expensive Lego bricks they are.
Eventually I got everything fixed and started the computer. Much to my relief it booted and I fiddled with the BIOS setup settings and restarted. Horror, the computer started to reboot everytime it reached the Windows loading screen (you know, the black screen with the Windows logo and the moving bar at the bottom). I could not enter safe mode either.
Therefore, I attempted to use the Windows XP installation CD to repair things. Everything went fine at first, the device driver files were being loaded. Right after that, just before the options to repair/ reinstall/ format HDDs were given, I received a blue screen of death: Error 0x0000007B. Awesome.
Consultations with friends lead me to conclude that the problems I was facing was either: 1) Faulty RAM. 2) I forgot to uninstall and clean my old motherboard files from my HDD 3) My HDDs were goners.
It doesn't appear to be #1 because I returned the RAM and got a new one from a different batch, but the problems persist. I therefore spent another 50 pounds on a new HDD which should arrive soon; hopefully Windows will install onto it and that I can rescue 20GB or so of my pictures. Sigh.
----------------
Oh, I visited the British International Motorshow at the Docklands. It was great, lots of awesome cars and the works. However I am in no mood to post a detailed entry with pictures etc, because I extremely pissed off at the fact that I lost my CF card with half the pictures that I took. Thankfully the 2GB is still around and I still have some awesome pictures. But the pictures of the Maybach concept car etc etc are gone. Bloody hell!!
posted by elb at
7/24/2006 10:06:00 pm
2 Comments:
I miss the time when I could get good 512MB PC3200 DDR sticks for only twenty quid.
Anyway the D 805 is apparently a pretty good overclocking capable processor, starting at 2.66Ghz, with slight voltage adjustment could easily reach 3.8Ghz.
By
Jon Choo, at Friday, July 28, 2006 10:55:00 pm
jon: aye, upgrading is a pain indeed :(
Heard of it as well, but apparently the 8xx series was getting phased out and had some thermal dissipation problems.
By
elb, at Monday, July 31, 2006 11:59:00 am
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