Mah New Hardware has arrived! (Now with more epic woes!)

[ainmosni]

I went on a spending spree on monday and I ordered some new parts for my home machine.

These are the parts:

ASUS P5E Motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Processor
Kingston 2x1GB DDR2-800 RAM.

And I also bought an iPod Touch as well, hackable PDA's ftw...

[Vandamguy]

[Eschatos]

Do want, need moar monies.

[IdiotWithGuns]

P5E is pretty mint.  I have 2 of them.  One word of edvise.  If you are going to run ddr2 1066 on this.  Update the bios or your system will be freezing at random times.  In the bios the setting on dd2 is set on auto but default.  When you select it to 1066 thats when its gonna freak out> <

Congrats tho.  Sounds like a nice set up.

[CaffeinePowered]

Asus - always the best choice, ALWAYS

[ainmosni]

P5E is pretty mint.  I have 2 of them.  One word of edvise.  If you are going to run ddr2 1066 on this.  Update the bios or your system will be freezing at random times.  In the bios the setting on dd2 is set on auto but default.  When you select it to 1066 thats when its gonna freak out> <

Congrats tho.  Sounds like a nice set up.

Well, like I put in the post, I got DDR2 800 RAM. I hope the BIOS on the mobo is semi recent (0303 or higher) or else I might not be able to get into post to flash my bios... At least that's what forums tell me but the people who've had these problems all posted that in january, later reviews didnt seem to have that problem.

[IdiotWithGuns]

Yeah Asus is pretty good.  But how about Gigabyte?

[ainmosni]

Asus - always the best choice, ALWAYS

You Asus fanboy you... but I agree, I haven't had a non-asus motherboard for a long time, I usually get Asus nvidia cards as well... I would never buy anything from ATI though.

[ainmosni]

God, that was a drama....

I came home from work, giddy as a schoolboy wanting to build in my new toys as soon as possible. First I backed up my files to my USB hard drive and I shut down windows. I built in my new mobo, ram and cpu and started up my machine, flash the bios from the USB drive I prepared from work (very nice feature) to let the mobo recognize my nice E8400... Wanting to laugh at how much my existing XP installation would get a heart attack, I booted it up. It booted after 5 minutes but both my USB keyboard and mouse wouldn't work and it showed the login prompt in glorious 640x480 on both my monitors, it seemed to have frozen... "Ah well, that's to be expected after 75% of the hardware changes" I thought and popped in the XP CD I had prepared.
All seemed well, the text based start loaded all the drivers like it should be, but when it said "Starting windows" all the power cut off my USB devices and it just froze.

"WTF, is this CD scratched?" I thought and I rebooted the machine but alas the same problem appeared once more. Thinking the CD was defective I tried booting up my linux partition in the hope that I could burn a new copy to try with again. I booted Ubuntu and it booted up like normal, once booted I got welcomed with the Ubuntu login prompt in the proper resolution, mouse and keyboard working properly. I logged in and noticed that all the new hardware was already working, no configuration or driver installation needed and working perfectly. That was great, at least one OS knows how to handle a huge hardware change, Microsoft could learn from that...

Wanting to play TF2 on my new hardware as soon as possible I started burning my XP iso to a CD and rebooted the machine. The machine booted from CD and it froze at exactly the same place before! "This isn't a crappy CD..." I thought and feelings of despair and fear came rising up from the pit of my stomach. The first thought I had was that the USB bus because of the USB power failing on both the old XP install and the installation CD...

Because I really didn't feel like sending the motherboard back, I tried disconnecting all the hardware one at a time and then to try getting the XP installer to work. Afterwards I ran memtest86 to see if my new RAM was in good condition. But all effort was to no avail and I had no idea why XP refused to install. Was the USB bus on this motherboad faulty? Why does Linux run so well on it while XP won't run at all. These questions wheren't answered that night as it was time to go to bed, it was 05:00 and I had to work at 10:00, but before I went to bed I booted up Linux and started a Vista torrent. I was thinking that if Linux has no problems with the hardware, I had to see if Vista did to make sure if it wasn't an XP issue.

The next day, when I came home from work, I burnt the Vista DVD and booted the installer. All seemed well, I got a GUI, mouse and keyboard and the installer seemed to work. All went well until Vista said it couldn't read a file from the DVD... This is the moment something clicked in my head! "It's my DVD drive which is broke, that's the only part besides my new hardware that I couldn't unplug!"

I ran to the store, which would have closed half an hour later and bought an USB DVD writer to install from. I popped in the Vista DVD and before I knew it I had a working Vista install just in time for the US TF2 FNF.

The machine performs a lot better than my old hardware and I'll enjoy it for many years to come.

The things I've learnt from this session is:

* Don't panic.
* Be persistent.
* Linux has much better hardware detection than windows.
* Linux supports a lot more hardware "out of the box" than windows.
* Windows XP reacts very weirdly and without logging to hardware errors.
* Vista seems a lot better (so far) than it was when I tried it.
* PC's are more complex than consoles but at least I could fix this myself instead of waiting a month for the manufacturer to fix it and ship it back to me. (And for people with less technical know how, shipping back the machine is off course a possibility.)
* You can build a decent gaming machine for the price of a ps3.

[CaffeinePowered]

We should start a horror stories thread...I got a few

[copulatingduck]

We should start a horror stories thread...I got a few

Hurrr, I've got a few from as recently as yesterday. I prefer to hide my shame though...

D':

[Wedge]

We should start a horror stories thread...I got a few

I assure you nothing can ever top mine.  It's an utterly bizarre problem that plagued me on and off for well over a year.

[Wedge]

And oh look, my computer is dying now =X

[cannedpeahes]

I bought Asus until I realized that my motherboard was doing something funkee to my HDDs, and frying them like omelets. My last HDD (before I sent it in) I must have reformatted twelve times.

[copulatingduck]

I bought Asus until I realized that my motherboard was doing something funkee to my HDDs, and frying them like omelets. My last HDD (before I sent it in) I must have reformatted twelve times.

I've been having this exact issue lately, and I've suspected my board or PSU. And my board is Asus... :'(

[Evil Cheese]

I wish (K)ubuntu would recognize my Nvidia MCP55 NIC. It's really starting to become a pain in the ass to fix.

[cannedpeahes]

What you may want to check is how well you have your HDD secured. The read/write heads can scratch against the platter and fuck up data left and right. Also, cheap PSUs are notorious unstable on the line that powers HDDs.

[broonor]

Now if I could just figure out why my hard drive isn't detecting I'd be golden.  Also, huzzah to new parts