Kay -N- Kay

The parts I ordered for my new computer arrived two days ago.  It was a Wednesday afternoon, when the sun was at it’s zenith and song birds filled the air with acoustic radiance to rival the sun’s splendor.

I was at work.  :-/

Two hours later, after counting down the last 30 minutes one at a time, I was racing home to two wondrous boxes of joy and happiness.  All the buyer’s remorse that consistently plagues me with purchases over about $1.50, was now gone.  It was like Christmas in July and Santa had mistakenly penned my name onto the “nice” list.

Just as one cannot just fill a stein with Meursault Clos de la Baronne and quaff it down like a Pabst, you can’t just start slamming together computer parts.  They must first be… savored.

After first laying everything out for proper admiration, I started on the assembly.  I’ll spare you ALL of the geeky details… I documented the process in pictures… but it was a long process.  At the end, my back screaming from hours of bending over the table, I was yanking out hard drive cages and adjusting cable layouts to fit in the monstrously huge video card.  From the back of the case to the front loaded hard drives, it has maybe half an inch to spare

After over 6 hours of labor, my brand new, bouncing baby computer was brought into this world.

Ooooh, pretty blue lights.  Hee hee.

So last week, my computer went *poof*.  I’ll pause for a moment of silence…

Ooooooh

This was the computer I “treated” myself to over 3 years ago.  Previously, I’d always purchased semi-reasonable computers with an eye to performance vs. affordability.  But this time, I went almost all out and bought an Alienware machine of near Earth shattering power.  In short, I was never really all that happy with it.

Now, it was as good and better than anything I’d ever gotten before, but my expectations were considerably higher.  It just never quite lived up to the hype, even though that hype was mostly in my own head, heh.

Last week, the computer had a series of unusual, but benign, “occurrences”.  Things that no one but a computer geek like me would notice, like locking up at an unusual time.  A Blue Screen of Death on a file that hadn’t occurred before.  A faint disturbance in the force.  Then, it just up and died.  I came back into the room and noticed the screen was blank.  I powered it off and it simply never came back on.  /cry

Everything seemed to still be getting power as the DVD drives would spin, all of the lights came on, fans spun and gizmos whirred.  But the damn thing just wouldn’t boot.  Nothing ever displayed on the screen and the beep that occurs when it starts reading the BIOS (or at least that’s the way I interpreted it) would never beep.

So what’s a nerd to do when his toy breaks?

Yep.  I took the whole thing apart.

Not just the normal things like video and sound cards and memory.  Oh no… out came the power supply, off came the cables, motherboard yanked, and oh my, is that the CPU?  Pop.  Everything came apart and surprisingly, it all went back together again.  But still no beep.

So what’s a nerd to do when he can’t fix his broken toy?

Yep, I’m building a new toy.  Better than before.  Stronger.  Faster… MORE POWERFUL THAN ANYTHING EVER BEFORE MUHAHAHHAHA.

Going the complete opposite direction from my last computer, this time I’m just ordering all of the individual pieces separately and will commence jamming them together where they seem most likely to fit.

• 1 x Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.66GHz LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Processor Model BX80601920 – Retail
• 1 x ASUS P6T LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Motherboard – Retail
• 1 x ZALMAN CNPS9700 LED 110mm 2 Ball CPU Cooler – Retail
• 1 x ZALMAN ZM-CS4A Socket 1366 Clip Support Kit for CNPS9500/9700 – Retail
• 1 x ARCTIC COOLING MX-2 Thermal Compound – Retail
• 1 x CORSAIR DOMINATOR 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Triple Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model TR3X6G1600C8D – Retail
• 1 x EVGA 896-P3-1170-AR GeForce GTX 275 896MB 448-bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card – Retail
• 2 x Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard Drives – OEM
• 1 x Antec Nine Hundred Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case – Retail
• 1 x ABS DARK BERET series DB850-M-BRZ Continuous 850W@50°C ATX12V/EPS12V 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified, SLI Ready, CrossFire Ready, Core i7 Ready, Single Strong 12V Rail, Modular Flat Cable Design, Active-PFC – Retail
• 1 x Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 64-bit for System Builders – OEM

For those of you who actually dated in high school, have friends that exist in a real 3rd dimension, and like to go outside for longer periods of time than just walking to your car:

• Intel’s newest Pentium CPU that doesn’t cost as much as New Zealand’s Gross National Product
• An ASUS motherboard to go with the CPU.
• Aftermarket CPU cooler
• 6GB of performance RAM
• nVidia GTX 275 video card
• Two 1TB hard drives. (1 Terabyte = 1,000 Gigabytes)
• A mid-tower case to hold it all and an 850 Watt power supply to, well, power it.
• Windows Vista, 64 bit version

And for those of you still confused, likely due to an unfulfilled life of fermented hops and one too many ‘wake-n-bake’ breakfasts lasting past your mid twenties when the rest of us realized that fat drunk and stupid really wasn’t the way to go through life:

• Fast box with pretty blue lights that makes solitaire play really fast!  Hee hee, look at the cards bounce across the screen, hee hee hee hee…

Naturally, the parts all arrive today, except for one.  Oh, the humanity of it all!