Ah, death to computers! may a pox be upon them!
So my main gaming rig (which is termed as such for old times sake) blew up on Friday; quite literally blew up - smoke was pouring out of the case, and the motherboard looked in places like pork crackling.
As you'll all be aware, this is not the sort of event that makes you want to jump for joy. It's expensive, and it's time consuming. It's doubly annoying because it means fighting tourists and drunkards in and around Tottenham Court Road.
Anyway. I've replaced the mobo with KT4 Ultra-FISR (£119.00) and finally switched to 333Mhz/512MB SDRAM (stop laughing at the back! - £69.99) - and upgraded the processor with a spare (seriously) Athlon 2200 XP (£0.00) I had knocking around.
Check out the spec. For the price I've given you above, you get *all* that; anything marked down as optional is thrown in - and it fucking loves it. I've now got more USB (2.0 at that) ports than god; and goddamned Bluetooth. Yeah, I'll never use the latter, but that ain't the point.
And the audio is amazing. Seriously. I've chosen for the first time ever, to stick with the onboard audio rather than disable it in the BIOS and rely on my trusty SBLive! - and I am seriously impressed.
Plus it's got an inbuilt gigabit LAN port..
Chaps, this motherboard rocks hard. My rig now screams along. Raven Shield, BattleField 1942, UnrealTournament.. all running at 1024*768 with everything turned on or to 'max' - jesus wept, I can shoot accurately now!
Now of course, I've discovered another technological nemesis; my Netgear Wireless Access Point (so allowing the flatmate to use my lappy) has decided to no longer communicate with anyone or anything... the quest continues...
Thursday 5 June 2003
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Ahhh I'm quite interested in this see cos I can envisage an upgrade soonenough - Half Life 2 will make me do it if nothing else. This boardsounds most leet although I suspect I'll be heading into p4 countrynorthish of 3ghz at the back end of the year. Now Guiness still looksgood in terms of drives, cards and PSU and stuff so my question is, ifone simply replaces mobo and cpu and plugs back in vid card and hd-1say, what happens on boot - how much of a struggle, or not, is it to getthis working WinXP authorisation issues aside? What do you need toattend to if anything with a pre-installed OS on your existing c drive?
ReplyDeleteIt's a fair point. And I was astonished, *astonished* at what happened when I hit boot for the first time.
ReplyDeleteWinXP got to the network login screen (XP Pro, configured for a network at home) and just sat there.. mouse wasn't powered on, keyboard didn't work.. but the hard drive light was going nuts.
5 minutes later, I come back to see what it's up to and all is quiet. It's init'd everything; and XP worked like a dream. The only thing I had to sort was the audio drivers and RAID drivers.. which considering this was a case of slapping in the CD and hitting 'one click install' was a piece of piss.
All in all thoroughly excellent. Well recommended.
Upgrading mobos and stuff works like this; if you're upgrading to the same chipset type/manufacturer, which in Brit's case was probably VIA KT series stuff, then XP will boot as normal then auto configure the shifted hardware and all is good.
ReplyDeleteThe other scenario is when you change chipset completely, which is what happens when you move from an Athlon to P4 sort of thing. In that case, XP wont boot because it loads the 32-bit drive controller drivers and barfs. The easiest way to fix it is to do a 'repair install' with XP boot disks or the CD. After that, you'll need to update the system with patches and possibly reinstall some stuff like Direct X but it should work fine.
Ah right. Well indeed I upgraded from one VIA based board to another VIA based board; in fact if I recall correctly (dubious at best) then they were both MSI boards.
ReplyDeleteMy motherboard died on saturday and unfortunately for me, I didn't make sure the chipset was the same on the replacement. Just to make things even better I seem to have lost my win2k cd during my move to my new flat so can't run all the repair stuff. I think this might be my pc's way of telling me that it would quite like to be upgraded to win xp now. ;-)
ReplyDeleteHehe, when I first saw this I thought KT4 ULTRA-FIST?! :)
ReplyDeleteThat'll be cos you luv it up you.
ReplyDelete