The good, the bad, and the stupid
Dec. 14th, 2007 11:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
plonqThe good: I have a working desktop computer again (more on that below).
The bad: It was -32 this morning when we left the house.
The stupid: ... and yet I somehow managed to forget my coat at home. In the words of Vizzini, "Inconceivable!"
Anyway, back to the working computer. As I may have mentioned here (or maybe I didn't) the motherboard in my old desktop computer died back in October. I had known that the video card was on its last legs after it had overheated a few times over the summer, but the death of the motherboard caught me off guard. I was in the middle of a game of Portal when the screen locked up and the system froze (a fairly common occurance), but this time it refused to boot back up afterward -- it would not even post. I suspected that the video card was at fault, so I swapped it out for an X1300 that I had borrowed from a friend at work, but it made no difference. The system would complain if I tried to power it up with no card, but as soon as I plugged in any video, the only activity I could tease out of it was the spinning of cooling fans.
I did a bit of shopping and finally settled on an another ASUS board, with an Intel quad-core chip. I was going to go with a dual-core AMD like![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
atara's system, but the store had a deal on at the time that actually made the quad-core combo a little cheaper. I bolted the works into the case, pulled out my shiny new Vista 64 Ultimate disk and started the long heartache of installing Windows.
Five days later I stopped trying to install Windows because I was developing Tourette syndrome, and a mild twitch in my left eye. I alternately blamed Windows and myself for the problems, but over the course of several days I had run out of ideas on how to make it work. As I began to compile a mental list of common errors I was encountering, I managed to hone my search terms when I was at work the next day, and eventually a sordid tale of woe and dispair began to emerge from the depths of Google. Apparently this motherboard had a known issue -- that is, known by all, but not acknowledged by Asus -- with raided SATA II drives, and with the WD drives that I owned in particular. It seems that if I had spent the extra $10 for the Seagate drives, I might have saved myself a lot of misery. From what I gleaned on the various message boards, I had followed all of the right steps in my efforts. In fact, as I read one account from a technician, I found that I had gone through exactly the same steps as he had.
The main difference was that he went through the steps once, but I went through all of them about five times, hoping for different results. I began to ponder on that Einstein quote about how insanity is "doing the same thing over and over, hoping for different results", and I decided that it was time to cut my losses and RMA the board. First I wanted to try one more thing, so stopped on the way home from work and bought some jumpers. I managed to get Windows to load once by putting jumpers on the drives to cut their transfer rates in half, and setting them up as IDE drives. Well, technically that was the second time I got it to install. Just like the first time, it began to self-destruct after the first reboot.
I RMAd the board, and went back to using my laptop for a couple of weeks while I pondered my options. I was a bit disillusioned with Asus in particular, and with Intel-based motherboards in general. I was leaning toward getting a Gigabyte, or maybe going back to Abit again since I'd had such good luck with their boards previously. In the end I picked up another Asus board, but only after I did much a much more thorough scouring of the boards to see if it had any issues. The one that had given me all of the trouble was a P35 based board, and this one was based on the X38 chipset, so I figured it was unlikely I'd experience the same problems.
To my surprise, (almost) everything worked perfectly on the first try. The RAID1 managed to corrupt itself when I accidentally rebooted Windows in the middle of installing some patches, but I am going to wipe the second drive and see if I can force it into a rebuild. If not, I will just run with two independent drives and be more vigilant about backing up my data. The other thing that gave me problems was the video card. I initially installed everything using my old 6800 video card, but after struggling with various drivers, I came to the conclusion that it had hardware problems. I pulled it out and replaced it with the borrowed X1300 and everything has been rock solid since. The video is not as fast as I would like, but it is a lot faster than I had expected. It works well enough for me to play all of the HL2 games and WoW.
It was working well enough tonight for a group of us from the guild to march into The Exodar and slaughter The Prophet Velen. The alliance didn't like that very much.
So far I am pretty pleased with the performance I am getting from Vista (though I cannot discount the hardware for much of that...). I like the way it does some things, and am suitably irritated by the way it does others. It did force me into doing something that has been on my "to do" list for ages; I ditched the Windows mail program in favour of Thunderbird. MS has dropped support for POP in Hotmail. At the same time, Addons for Thunderbird now allow me to add Hotmail into my server list and treat it as a POP/SMTP server. Cool.
The bad: It was -32 this morning when we left the house.
The stupid: ... and yet I somehow managed to forget my coat at home. In the words of Vizzini, "Inconceivable!"
Anyway, back to the working computer. As I may have mentioned here (or maybe I didn't) the motherboard in my old desktop computer died back in October. I had known that the video card was on its last legs after it had overheated a few times over the summer, but the death of the motherboard caught me off guard. I was in the middle of a game of Portal when the screen locked up and the system froze (a fairly common occurance), but this time it refused to boot back up afterward -- it would not even post. I suspected that the video card was at fault, so I swapped it out for an X1300 that I had borrowed from a friend at work, but it made no difference. The system would complain if I tried to power it up with no card, but as soon as I plugged in any video, the only activity I could tease out of it was the spinning of cooling fans.
I did a bit of shopping and finally settled on an another ASUS board, with an Intel quad-core chip. I was going to go with a dual-core AMD like
atara's system, but the store had a deal on at the time that actually made the quad-core combo a little cheaper. I bolted the works into the case, pulled out my shiny new Vista 64 Ultimate disk and started the long heartache of installing Windows.Five days later I stopped trying to install Windows because I was developing Tourette syndrome, and a mild twitch in my left eye. I alternately blamed Windows and myself for the problems, but over the course of several days I had run out of ideas on how to make it work. As I began to compile a mental list of common errors I was encountering, I managed to hone my search terms when I was at work the next day, and eventually a sordid tale of woe and dispair began to emerge from the depths of Google. Apparently this motherboard had a known issue -- that is, known by all, but not acknowledged by Asus -- with raided SATA II drives, and with the WD drives that I owned in particular. It seems that if I had spent the extra $10 for the Seagate drives, I might have saved myself a lot of misery. From what I gleaned on the various message boards, I had followed all of the right steps in my efforts. In fact, as I read one account from a technician, I found that I had gone through exactly the same steps as he had.
The main difference was that he went through the steps once, but I went through all of them about five times, hoping for different results. I began to ponder on that Einstein quote about how insanity is "doing the same thing over and over, hoping for different results", and I decided that it was time to cut my losses and RMA the board. First I wanted to try one more thing, so stopped on the way home from work and bought some jumpers. I managed to get Windows to load once by putting jumpers on the drives to cut their transfer rates in half, and setting them up as IDE drives. Well, technically that was the second time I got it to install. Just like the first time, it began to self-destruct after the first reboot.
I RMAd the board, and went back to using my laptop for a couple of weeks while I pondered my options. I was a bit disillusioned with Asus in particular, and with Intel-based motherboards in general. I was leaning toward getting a Gigabyte, or maybe going back to Abit again since I'd had such good luck with their boards previously. In the end I picked up another Asus board, but only after I did much a much more thorough scouring of the boards to see if it had any issues. The one that had given me all of the trouble was a P35 based board, and this one was based on the X38 chipset, so I figured it was unlikely I'd experience the same problems.
To my surprise, (almost) everything worked perfectly on the first try. The RAID1 managed to corrupt itself when I accidentally rebooted Windows in the middle of installing some patches, but I am going to wipe the second drive and see if I can force it into a rebuild. If not, I will just run with two independent drives and be more vigilant about backing up my data. The other thing that gave me problems was the video card. I initially installed everything using my old 6800 video card, but after struggling with various drivers, I came to the conclusion that it had hardware problems. I pulled it out and replaced it with the borrowed X1300 and everything has been rock solid since. The video is not as fast as I would like, but it is a lot faster than I had expected. It works well enough for me to play all of the HL2 games and WoW.
It was working well enough tonight for a group of us from the guild to march into The Exodar and slaughter The Prophet Velen. The alliance didn't like that very much.
So far I am pretty pleased with the performance I am getting from Vista (though I cannot discount the hardware for much of that...). I like the way it does some things, and am suitably irritated by the way it does others. It did force me into doing something that has been on my "to do" list for ages; I ditched the Windows mail program in favour of Thunderbird. MS has dropped support for POP in Hotmail. At the same time, Addons for Thunderbird now allow me to add Hotmail into my server list and treat it as a POP/SMTP server. Cool.
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no subject
Date: 2007-12-15 05:43 am (UTC)Sweet zombie Jesus on that temperature! Southerners can complain about dehydration, heat stroke, and melanoma, but Canada will kill in a matter of minutes if you let it!
Did I ask you about your RAID yet? You have it set to striping (are they still calling it that) for wicked-dope fast transfer rates, right? Is it a noticeable improvement all the time, or just with certain types of transfers/access/whatever?
no subject
Date: 2007-12-15 07:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-15 02:48 pm (UTC)One thing sounds familiar. I upgraded my Mac to Leopard and the Apple Mail program is obviously buggy compared to the one in Tiger.
I'm seriously considering changing to Thunderbird as well... either that or re-install Tiger.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-15 07:50 pm (UTC)The only thing that kept me from switching to Thunderbird a long time ago was its lack of support for Hotmail -- and that has since been resolved. So far I am likin' this mail client.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-16 03:12 am (UTC)At least they are keeping the "it's got what plants crave" slogan :P
no subject
Date: 2007-12-16 04:17 am (UTC)...still can't use it for work though. *shrug*