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Saturday, Mar 14, 2009 - 20:44 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

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Murphy In Da House

The story today begins with my computer abruptly entering sleep mode, and not waking from it, several times in the past few days. I successfully ignored its silent entreaties, and was unpleasantly shocked to discover one morning that the computer refused to output any signal to the monitor, despite appearing to boot adequately in other respects. After the usual percussive maintenance did not have any effect, some research on the family box suggested that it was either a partial failure of the Power Supply Unit, or a conked-out graphics card.

I figured, why not replace both, and have spares if necessary? Hitched a ride on my grandpa's van to Sim Lim Square, where I grabbed a Coolermaster Silent Pro M600 600W PSU, and an nvidia 9800 card that I ended up having to return as my system's micro-sized motherboard didn't even have a PCI-e slot.

Made another trip with my uncle, and discovered first hand how wonderful the evening jam can be towards the city area (I would have guessed the opposite, that the after-work traffic should be clogged from the CBD outwards instead). Three hours later, I verified that my old N7600GS had indeed committed hari-kiri, perhaps due to the shame of being asked to buck up in my last post.

I thought that was the end of it, but no, Windows XP began refusing to boot. With no more time to waste, it was time to whip out the ATM card and fund an early upgrading spree. Lugged the old system down to Fuwell, where I picked out a 3GHz Core 2 Duo E8400 chip (S$285) on an ASUS P5QL-E motherboard (S$157) and a Seagate 1.5TB hard disk (S$223) as my new primary drive, no thanks to the pain inflicted by having a full system partition.

I had originally wanted to transfer my brand new AGP card over, only to discover that it wasn't supported on my new motherboard. Encouraged by the rows of spanking new merchandise on display, I forked out for an XFX 9800GT card (S$205). Of course it all needed a new case to go into, and the four 5.25-inch slots and side window of the Coolermaster Elite 330 (S$69) looked nicest to me.

Whiled away an hour and a half as the serviceman (an uncle probably some 50 years old) did the assembly (S$20), but more issues cropped up: Firstly, the RAM from my old system was obsoleted as well, so there went another S$68 for 4GB of DDR2 RAM. Also, my antique Samsung 150GB drive caused the system not to boot, so he had hooked up only the new 1.5TB one, and my other 200GB drive containing my life's work. He also decided to leave out my dusty old floppy drive from the last decade for aesthetic reasons, and I have to agree with his judgment there - the casing was simply too handsome for that. Probably will pop down one of these days to get a black floppy drive just to fill the slot, still.


It's so... beautiful...

Then came the tricky part back home - migrating my stuff properly. First was copying about the entire contents of my old 200GB drive onto the new 1.5TB drive, which took some time; the blazing speed of the new system was worth everything, though - think the new underpants feel, multiplied by a thousand. Losing years of accumulated gunk (installed-and-used-once programs, conflicting configurations, etc) and having a desktop with a single column of icons has that effect. Switched to a new cordless Logitech keyboard for good measure, though I kept my X7 a4tech mouse since I had gotten used to its feel.

I then installed the programs that I most needed, though an oversight involving drive letters - many installations don't take kindly to having their designations changed after the fact - meant that I had to spend a couple of hours reinstalling stuff. Happily, I discovered a fix for the problem of the Samsung 150GB drive preventing booting. Since it was, as suspected, working fine when hot-plugged into the third SATA controller once XP was up and running, I garnered that it was a BIOS configuration issue, and indeed setting the BIOS to allow Plug-and-Play of drives by default worked a charm. Also disabled the non-functional Express Gate option to gain a few more seconds each boot.

Formatted my old drives after that, for a new setup of a 500GB system partition (take that, patch bloat!), 500GB for "work", 500GB for "data" (and my academic files) on the new drive, with the 200GB one now wholly for games, and the final 150GB one for backup and scratch purposes. Might also get Ubuntu onto it, since the new Wubi Installer makes it so easy to dual-boot. To think of the days when it required mucking about with extx partitions and system files! Lost some minor stuff like my custom MSN emoticons and some old script files, but overall I have to call it a success.

I give it two years before the new computer degrades to unusuability as the 2TB of space is filled, if history is anything to go by.

$1877.25/$2100 for the Challenge, and here goes nothing:

$50 on Man Utd (-1.5) vs Liverpool (at 3.50) - probably not, but at 3.50...
$50 on Arsenal to draw Blackburn (3.90) - another measured long shot



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