Technobabble
Many of you have heard tales of the epic Saga of Ryan's PC. Well let me put it to you straight, because it's STILL going on.
To be brief, I believed I was having a motherboard issue for a LONG time, when it was really a string of poorly made power supplies shorting out my system. Since I blamed the MoBo, I continued to RMA it and any broken parts, only to plug them back into my shit power supply. This lasted a long, long time (eight months is a fucking LONG TIME to be without a computer) and involved many false diagnosis, false hopes, and biting dissapointments.
Eventually I gave up on my rig, and armed with the knowledge that, in face, EVERYTHING but the powersupply and the RAM was bad, set out to constuct an entire new beast. A better beast, with bigger pipelines, faster clocks speeds, and more onboard memory. Something with a GPU that has a big fat X followed by a three digit number that is a code for 'fucking sweet.'
Thanks to Christ's birthday, I succeeded. My parents gave me a new Mobo, hard drive, and DVD R/W drive. And, using the 175 I got from LHG (Long Haired Grandpa, my father's father) and the 25 I got from Grandma DeMoss (My father's mother's mother) I bought a Sapphire X800 G20 by ATI. It's a bitchin card. You can tell by the silverly lookin' chick with the big boobies that graces it's cooling block. I plug it all in, all new components, a totally new box, everything ready to r0xx0ur, and....
It doesn't work. What the FUCK?!?
So, I do a little diagnostics, and determine that my RAM is bad. The ram that I paid Digilink 60 dollars to test and verify perfect functionality on. Luckilly, I buy Kingston, and I use my lifetime warranty to get two new sticks.
This is where it get's really fun. Because the thing works, it just freezes every 5 - 7 minutes. Now I'm really pulling my hair out. What is going on? I spend a total of eight hours over the course of two days installing XP. First, I've lost my product key and I call Hindi - soft to get a new one, then it takes six hours to get to the point where I am prompted to enter said key (This involves probably five re-formats of the HD). THEN the key turns out to be WRONG, so I call Hindi - soft back up and get a NEW new key. It then takes me two hours to get BACK to the screen which asks for the fucking key. The key works, and after another hour of aborted attempts to install windows, it FINALLY gets up and running.
BUUUUUT
It still freezes. And the DVD R/W doesn't work. So I give in, and call Mike Campbell, who literally IS a computer, for help. He points me to a few programs, and after countless theories (The HD is bad, the DVD IDE cable is attempting to automatically set it's master/slave relationship and setting it incorrectly, the Sasquatch secretly ate half of my processor the night before and made it out of Kalamazoo unmolested by mankind) I discover the culprit. It's a fucking RAM slot. Slot two doesn't work. I've had NO problems since I switched to slots one and three.
So, fucking great. I know what's wrong, all I have to do is RMA the goddamn motherboard (This will be the FOURTH time I've RMA'd a MoBo in the last year) and I'm all set.
EXCEPT!!!!!! (GASP!1!!)
DFI doesn't have ANY RMA info on their website!
AREHGHGHAHGSDHDFSGHSDGH
Eventually I gave up on my rig, and armed with the knowledge that, in face, EVERYTHING but the powersupply and the RAM was bad, set out to constuct an entire new beast. A better beast, with bigger pipelines, faster clocks speeds, and more onboard memory. Something with a GPU that has a big fat X followed by a three digit number that is a code for 'fucking sweet.'
Thanks to Christ's birthday, I succeeded. My parents gave me a new Mobo, hard drive, and DVD R/W drive. And, using the 175 I got from LHG (Long Haired Grandpa, my father's father) and the 25 I got from Grandma DeMoss (My father's mother's mother) I bought a Sapphire X800 G20 by ATI. It's a bitchin card. You can tell by the silverly lookin' chick with the big boobies that graces it's cooling block. I plug it all in, all new components, a totally new box, everything ready to r0xx0ur, and....
It doesn't work. What the FUCK?!?
So, I do a little diagnostics, and determine that my RAM is bad. The ram that I paid Digilink 60 dollars to test and verify perfect functionality on. Luckilly, I buy Kingston, and I use my lifetime warranty to get two new sticks.
This is where it get's really fun. Because the thing works, it just freezes every 5 - 7 minutes. Now I'm really pulling my hair out. What is going on? I spend a total of eight hours over the course of two days installing XP. First, I've lost my product key and I call Hindi - soft to get a new one, then it takes six hours to get to the point where I am prompted to enter said key (This involves probably five re-formats of the HD). THEN the key turns out to be WRONG, so I call Hindi - soft back up and get a NEW new key. It then takes me two hours to get BACK to the screen which asks for the fucking key. The key works, and after another hour of aborted attempts to install windows, it FINALLY gets up and running.
BUUUUUT
It still freezes. And the DVD R/W doesn't work. So I give in, and call Mike Campbell, who literally IS a computer, for help. He points me to a few programs, and after countless theories (The HD is bad, the DVD IDE cable is attempting to automatically set it's master/slave relationship and setting it incorrectly, the Sasquatch secretly ate half of my processor the night before and made it out of Kalamazoo unmolested by mankind) I discover the culprit. It's a fucking RAM slot. Slot two doesn't work. I've had NO problems since I switched to slots one and three.
So, fucking great. I know what's wrong, all I have to do is RMA the goddamn motherboard (This will be the FOURTH time I've RMA'd a MoBo in the last year) and I'm all set.
EXCEPT!!!!!! (GASP!1!!)
DFI doesn't have ANY RMA info on their website!
AREHGHGHAHGSDHDFSGHSDGH