I’m now totally switched over to my new PC, which I called Barracuda. I moved it over to my desk, after tossing my old PC aside. I’ll come back to that later and install Linux on it.
In other news, I got 3 vaccines today: tetanus, hepatitis A, and hepatitis B. They said I need to come back in a month for a 2nd injection for one of the hepatitis vaccines, but reading up on them on the CDC website, I’m confused. CDC says you need 3 shots to be immune. Hmm….
I’m impressed. The MoveMe software worked quite well. I apparently moved all my applications and data files over to my new PC. In fact, it moved some apps over that I thought I got rid of long, long ago! It got about 80% of the apps right, with the other 20% needing some manual repair (uninstalling and re-installing). But overall, this saved me quite a bit of time. Hurray!
Well, I took the day off work and spent about half the day building my new PC. In the end, I decided to take the full ATX size motherboard that I originally bought by accident, and the non-ECC RAM I bought when I learned the ECC wouldn’t work, and base my new PC off that. I bought a great new power supply and case this morning from PC Club, along with another 512 MB DIMM, and spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon assembling it all. And it’s now all together and working!
I’m using some software called Move Me to transfer all my files from my old PC to my new one. Why not just copy them over the network? Well, that only transfers data files, but Move Me (supposedly) will move entire applications over. If all goes well, that’ll save me literally hours of laborious work re-installing every one of the dozens of programs I have. It’s been moving things for about 5 hours now (around 55 GB of files) and should be done soon. I’ll let you know how it goes. I’m hoping this $39 investment works. If so, it’ll save me somewhere around 10 to 15 hours of re-installing stuff, I’m guessing. Assuming it works, that’s a good deal.
I’m calling the new PC by the name Barracuda, in keeping with our aquatic theme. My laptop is Ahi, my old desktop is Sponge, and Beth’s desktop is Seahorse (I think).
It’s been nice having a day off, too. I got many other chores done today that had piled up, and made some progress reading the scuba diving book. I’ve got to finish the current section, then we can watch another chapter of the DVD and read another chapter of the book. All before our class, which is in about 3 weeks, if I remember right.
Well, my project to build a new PC has been the typical frustrating mess these things usually turn out to be. By Friday, all the various parts had arrived. I spent some time Friday evening and Saturday putting it all together. And when I turned the new PC on, nothing happened. Not even the beep that indicates the thing is starting it’s POST cycle (power on self test).
So, I took everything back apart and did hours and hours of debugging and troubleshooting. It’s now Sunday night and the thing still doesn’t work right. Here’s what I’ve found so far:
1) The original motherboard I bought was an ATX form factor, not MicroATX. DOH! So I found that the local PC Club had the model I really intended to buy.
2) The memory I originally bought mail order doesn’t work with the motherboard I bought. That was why the PC wasn’t even getting to the POST beep. I bought 2 sticks of another kind of memory and even tested one of the sticks in the store to make sure it worked.
3) The new memory I bought? Well, the motherboard will only boot if only one stick is installed. It can be either stick, in either slot. Just not both at the same time. So, I’m stuck at only 512 MB of RAM.
4) The ATI X800 Pro video card I bought doesn’t work with this system, either. It has a place where you’re supposed to plug in one of the hard drive power cables, because the video card takes more power than the AGP slot will provide. Well, even when I have the extra power plugged in, the video card gives a long constant beep and shows an error message on the screen that I haven’t plugged in the extra power.
So, now I’m starting to have serious second thoughts about this whole thing. Right now I have the original motherboard to return, 2 memory sticks to return, and an expensive video card that doesn’t work. Bah!
CBBC Newsround | WORLD | Siberian boy, 7, raised by dogs – I didn’t believe this when I first read it on another web page, but it looks like the BBC is reporting the same story. I’m more inclined to believe what I read from the BBC, compared to Onlypunjab.com. Bizarre, eh?
This weekend, I’m going to start building a new kick ass PC. The last of the parts shipments were just dropped off by the UPS guy, according to an IM from my lovely wife Beth. Once I finish building this machine and move everything over, I’ll wipe the disk and install Linux on it. Then, I will once again have a Windows XP desktop and a Linux desktop at home.
Here’s what’s going into my new PC:
2 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 ST3160827AS 160GB Serial ATA 7200RPM Hard Drive w/8MB Buffer
1 x Logitech Cordless MX Duo Elite Keyboard w/MX700 Optical Mouse Combo Retail
1 x Antec Lifestyle ARIA MicroATX Cube Case Retail
1 x Sony DWU18ABK Internal DVD±RW Bare Drive (Black)
1 x MSI K8N Neo Platinum nForce3 250Gb Athlon 64 Skt754 DDR ATX Motherboard w/Audio, LAN, RAID/SATA Retail
1 x AMD Athlon 64 3700+ Processor Socket 754 Retail
1 x ATI Radeon X800 PRO AGP 8X 256MB DDR Video Card Retail
2 x (86017) Corsair CM72SD512RLP-3200 512MB DDR400 PC3200 ECC Registered Double Data Rate Memory Retail
As you can see, I ordered a pair of 7200 RPM SATA drives, which I plan to mirror using the hardware RAID 0. I’m hoping to get significantly increased disk I/O out of this arrangement.
I’m eventually planning to buy a 17″ Hydis 10ms LCD monitor for this, but they’re not for sale yet. So for now I’ll stick with my old 21″ Nokia CRT.
The Antec Aria case should be good fun. It’s supposedly the quietest PC case around, and looks very nice, and is small.
Wilhelm scream – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – How come I never knew about “the Wilhelm scream”?