Tonight's special: baked motherboard

[[AK]The Beast]

Well, it seems that my motherboard at home went belly-up. That means it's off to the mall and CompUSA today--in the interest of a speedy recovery, I'm going to pay premium prices to carry the new mobo (and new memory it will require) home today. Hopefully I should be back online tonight or tomorrow....

[[AK]StitchJones]

CompUSA!?!?!?!?!?!?! {Smacks Beatie in head} How dare you go to that vile POS awful store. You must have at least one more option for computer parts. I hate CompUSA with a passion!!!

[[AK]Squidly]

CompUSA is getting better - for SOME things. The cheaper mod products are ok...the fan covers, the extension cables for internal wires. The power supplies even.

They rape you over the cost of CPUs tho, and the motherboard selection is very weak.

[[AK]The Beast]

I wish I had another good option around here, but there's really nothing else for miles around, save a horrible local "chain" (I think they have 2 stores). The people that work there are either the dumbest computer store employees ever or they're actively trying to rip you off--my money is on the latter. Anyway, I did the "buy online/pick up at the store" thing so it wouldn't get me home too late--it's almost Miller Time, after all!

[[AK]Bribo]

You could probably order it on the net and pay for overnight delivery and still save $$$ rather than going to CompUSA.

[[AK]The Beast]

Yeah, but unfortunately I'm impatient enough that I paid a premium in order to be able to work on it last night. As you can see, I'm back online now, though, with only a couple more minor bugs to get out of the system. The upshot of the fried motherboard is that I've upgraded from 896 MB of PC133 to 512 MB of DDR400; my processor is now an Athlon XP 2700+ instead of an Athlon 1100, and my Radeon 9500 is now running at 8x AGP (the old mobo had an upper limit of 4x). Bottom line is my computer is running stronger and faster than ever before--the only downside is that it was about $200 more than I'd hoped to spend. Ah well.

[[AK]Gunny Highway]

CompUSA!?!?!?!?!?!?! {Smacks Beatie in head} How dare you go to that vile POS awful store. You must have at least one more option for computer parts. I hate CompUSA with a passion!!!

Spoken Like a true EX-employee.

[[AK]The Beast]

Epilogue to the story: computer is back up and running better than ever. Turns out you have to set the clock frequency in the BIOS, not just with the jumper--once I fixed that little nugget, the processor started running at the 2.13 ghz it's supposed to, rather than the 1.33 I was getting from the start. I also had some weird hard drive problems with my primary drive, but I think it's due to power issues--I removed a hard drive cooler from the 5 1/4" bay that was acting as an intake fan, not actually cooling any hard drives, and the problem seems to have gone away with it. Guess a 300W power supply doesn't cut it anymore. Anyway, I ghosted the hard drive to a backup, so if it flakes again, I'll be ready. I played some Secret Weapons with Gemini, Hardnok, and Lavarious late night on Saturday, and as they can attest, I was absolutely awestruck. I cranked the graphics up to the max on a full 32 player game and experienced no stuttering or "slideshow" effects--previously, I'd seen problems even with the graphics set to "low" when a large firefight would break out. Amazing how a few hundred bucks can make such a big difference.

[[AK]StitchJones]

Originally posted by [AK]Gunny Highway
Spoken Like a true EX-employee.

Yeah but now I work with you so I have been saved {Amazing Grace Music on BagPipes}