GoneWacko’s Blog

Progress

So yeah, I’m building a PC for the first time in my life, and doing well!

Ironically the most difficult part was getting the Zalman CNPS9700 installed.

Unfortunately the case for some lame reason didn’t come with a case fan, so I couldn’t even start installing software yesterday. I’ve bought two case fans now - a 120mm Coolermaster and a 92mm Zalman, which I will install some time today when a friend is coming over to help with the last bits.

Furthermore, the IDE cable was too short to reach my DVD drives due to the fact that it’s a pretty large case. So I also bought a longer IDE cable.

Even furthermore, the GeForce EN8800 GTX is HUEG LIEK XBOX! Unfortunately I completely forgot to take pictures of it before it was installed, but oh well.

The only real barriers I’m expecting from now on are going over all the cables a second time to double check that everything’s where it should be, and RAID support for Vista - Apparently it was only very recently released as an update, although I’ve not been able to find any information about this.

It actually seems I’ll need to install a floppy drive in order to install the RAID drivers, too :/

It’s the motherload!

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Woo, the mailman has honored my house with two big boxes of stuff today!

Those three objects wrapped in paper are my four hard drives (one of those wrappings contains two drives, the others only contain one). Furthermore, the photo does not include a picture of Vista because that OEM box is rather featureless.

That GeForce EN8800GTX box is HUEG LIEK XBOX! It’s dimensions are 46 cm x 31 cm x 9 cm!

Furthermore it must be said that cool-prices.nl is the best store ever!
I ordered my DVD-ROM, DVD+-RW, Zalman CNPS9700 LED CPU Fan and two hard drives yesterday sometime around 1:00 PM. By 3:00 PM they verified that I’d receive them tomorrow (i.e. today).

Today, I ordered two 22″ Samsung Syncmaster 226BW monitors at cool-prices. I included a service called pixel insurance which makes it possible to replace a monitor free of charge if there is only the slightest bit of pixel death.
3 minutes after I placed the order, they called me, telling me I only had insurance for one monitor, and if this was correct.
I wanted insurance for both monitors, so they would send me an extra invoice for the extra insurance, but would still send the monitors over today because I had already spent so much money at their store.

They’re the best!
Unfortunately the insurance did end up being rather expensive, so I’m almost hoping one of them will have dead pixels ;).

Now I just have to wait for my motherboard, case (has arrived at the store but they’re waiting for the motherboard to arrive before sending it over) and CPU (which is probably going to take another couple of days, unfortunately).
Waiting sucks :(.

There is a god

So today I re-assembled my laptop and, to my surprise, everything still works!

I am now obviously quite relieved.

The only anomaly I have noticed so far is that the right mouse button of my mouse pad makes a bit of a clicky noise when you press it, due to the dried up milk.

I ran CHKDSK and everything seems to be fine :o.

In other news, I created a small database for me to keep track of my computer components with. You can find a link to it’s contents in the navigation bar at the top of my blog :).

Got Milk?

I did.

But then I accidentally threw it all over my laptop.

Fuck.
Stupid as I am, I actually turned it on again not too long afterwards, when I had let the milk seep out and cleaned the surface with toiletpaper.

I got nice flashy artifacts all over my monitor.
Then I quickly switched it off.

Safe to say I think I’m fucked now.
Also, the timing could hardly be worse: I just spent all of my savings meant for spending on computers on my new PC.
I’m only in luck that I now have a week long holiday and thus have time to sort things out if I have to.

Also, the hard drive - of which I have no backups - seems to have survived.

As the Dutch slogan goes: “Melk is goed voor elk”, which translates to as much as “Milk is good for everyone”.
I hereby beg to differ.

First driving lesson and Phase 3

My first driving lesson

was today. I was pretty nervous before the ride, I was somewhat nervous during the ride, and, ironically, I was pretty nervous again after the ride.

I personally was pretty negative about my driving in the sense that things went quite differently from how I expected them to go.
However, the instructor seemed pretty positive about my performance, especially because I had zilch previous experience.

Things to not do while driving:

• Put the brakepedal to the metal when the instructor says ‘brake very lightly’
• Look at your shiftstick when you’re shifting gears, resulting in you nearly driving into parked cars constantly
• Forget to considering anyone coming from your right

Amongst various other things.

It’s also quite embarrassing when you’re in the middle of a busy road and you don’t have any gear selected.
Furthermore, this was a potentially dangerous situation for *someone*:
A car is parked on the side of a busy road, with the driver standing on the road at the driver’s side of the car. A bus is parked at the bus stop on the other side of the road.
I try to overtake the parked car, nearly drive into him because I’m not used to the car’s dimensions, and then the bus starts driving away.
Safe to say it was a tight fit and the instructor had to help me steer that one. I think it had something to do with the fact that I had only been driving for 5 minutes at the time. I was happy I was even moving at all :O.

Phase 3 of operation “New Computer”

So I changed some minor stuff.
Basically I decided to hold off on two of the hard drives for now. The money I save by doing so I shall use for two important components for a good gaming machine, or in fact any PC:

• The power supply unit. I chose the Zalman ZM600-HP, mainly because it was the most popular item on tweakers.net for the ‘PSU’ category
• The operating system. I’ve decided to go with Windows Vista Ultimate, UK, 64-bit. The OEM version costs a mere *cough* 160 euros. I would actually have most of the stuff I’d need if I went with Vista Home Premium (who wouldn’t?), but I’ve been using vista ultimate on my laptop for quite a while now and I would probably get annoyed if anything I was used to was missing on my PC.

When I have money again, I’ll buy two more hard drives together with a proper RAID card, the on board RAID is sufficient (for now?), but a separate RAID card with separate RAM should in theory boost it all up a bit more.

Operation “New Computer”, Phase 2

So yeah, 1965 euros wasn’t expensive enough…

Major changes:

• Faster RAM (CL4 instead of CL5)
• Quad-core processor instead of dual-core
• More hard drives to allow for better RAID setup.
• Added a case to the equation

I like it, and I can afford it, if I also count the PSU, CPU Fan and possibly a new keyboard.

Also, yes I am crazy…

Operation “New Computer”, Phase 1

Recently I went ahead and used the Tweakers.net Pricewatch (which is a database of the hardware prices at many many Dutch/Belgian (web)stores) to compile a new computer. What I basically did was check to see how much money the system that was being recommended by the PC gaming magazine I read (PCGameplay) as a High-end gaming machine.

The price is around 2000 euros, which means I can just about afford it now!

Of course, one has to note that I might go with smaller-but-faster hard drives, because I already have 920 GB of storage on my linux machine anyway, and that it currently features 4 GB of RAM which is nice and certainly an end goal, but not something that I would want to buy right away. The 300+ euros I save by going with 2 GB of RAM for now could be used to buy a better processor (Quad core as I’m currently envisioning it), amongst other options.

I’m not too good with hardware to be honest, I can tell when something is good, but for example I don’t know much about the tradeoffs between two high end pieces of hardware.
Luckily I have friends who know more about it.

Of course this price does not include the PSU, case, DVD-ROM drive(s), etc. But that shouldn’t cost too much more.
I’m also still wanting a good sound card (as in 7.1 surround sound would be nice) and a new monitor, but there’s less of a priority on those. I just hope I can find a job as a programmer sometime in the not-to-far-away future so I can make some cash

My first driving lesson

It went great!

This photo was taken at 12:45 PM. My driving lesson was planned for 2:00 PM. The meteorology bureau expected another 8 or so centimeters of snow by then.

By extrapolating these figures we come to the conclusion that the driving school called off/postponed my first lesson.

The driving school said it wasn’t a good idea to have any driving lessons, but it certainly wasn’t a good idea to have a first driving lesson.

I finally called!

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Yes, I finally called the driving school.
I said I was going to call them sometime in August, but then I didn’t.

But now I did! Next thursday I’ve got a one hour test lesson to see if I like the guy and to decide on the amount of lessons I need. I’ve played Carmageddon and Need For Speed, so I’m confident I’ll do great!