The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

Never you mind, but suffice to say it's not even in that picture, at all.

On the large table at the back are the 8 new WD20EARSes.
The 4-bay box on the small table contains the WD10EAVS and the three WD10EADSes.
The other drives on the table are the 750GB Samsung, 750GB Seagate, one WD10EACS and the single WD15EADS.
The 4 drives on top of the server are the four older WD10EACSes.

Anything 'private' is stored on my own PC on the other HD753LJ or the 1TB Caviar Black, or on my older drives, the 250GB WD SE16, 400GB Samsung, the other 250GB WD or the two 37GB Raptors.
The other old 250GB WD is still in the case in this picture.

 

Thanks Sam!

Russ

 

ok time to install win7. wish me luck...lol its not the install thats bad its putting all the programs back... i hate this.

edit:
ok about 23 mins to install win7 not as bad as i was thinking..lol
now for all my drivers and such.

first how do i make it where i dont have to put in a password when windows first starts up. i want to turn the puter on and bam right to desktop without putting in a password.

 

man i can not find anything in here...lol
plus it haven trouble getting the drivers for one of my burners. and the usb card reader??? UGGHHHHHHH

 

That feature was removed even in XP, let alone Vista/7, it was a security exploit.
You may be able to 'hack' it back, not sure.

 

Control panel - > User accounts and family safety - > Change your windows password - > Remove your windows password

 

And drivers...I have had luck doing a windows update and letting it update hardware along with software. One time i installed win7 without any driver input, just allowing windows every update. It did well, except for gfx card and most of us have a gfx card and installs the driver before checking all the "minor" drivers so i guess its not really an issue.

 

Hot Damn, finally some humor from sammy, didn't know you had it in ya!

 

Haha, I'm really not a miserable person IRL, honest!

 

I am LOL! I'll get over it I hate my job...

Found a winner. Not sure who messed up, but The billing information was posted after midnight, so I won't get my 40mm fan til monday. That's too late. My brother's having a party tomorrow night, so I've had to think outside the box. I have a spare 60mm x 60mm x 10mm that I can hot glue to the heatsink ever so carefully. Which is fine. It seems to be doing as good or better at cooling the NB, then the 70mm fan I experimented with. I believe its hitting at least another 1500rpms. However, its rather loud. At least right next to it. Thankfully the frequency doesn't carry more than 10ft :S Music will no doubt be playing semi loud, so it's not a big deal. As long as it doesn't crash

In the future, I'll definitely be more choosy about which HTPC case I choose. This ones airflow depends too much on the PSU for exhaust. NOT good...

 

cincyrob,
Unfortunately for people who like to password windows, or set up profiles, your password can be exploited to lock you out of your own windows. With XP, it would render your wallpaper only, and the mouse pointer would move, but not be able to do anything, as the click is disabled. You can't even get into the task manager as the keyboard keys are rendered inoperable. There are no icons on the screen, just your wallpaper. I came across this twice with Vista, and you had to completely wipe the drive before you could even run the restore disk that came with that laptop, with the first one, and was able to use the AVG recovery disk to repair it on the second one. The only difference was that the first laptop sat for months, while the other one was brought to me immediately after failing to get it to work in two tries. I gather from that, the more times you try, the worse it gets. That second particular computer was the only one I've ever been able to recover in about a dozen tries. If you try and access the HDD with a boot disk and make changes with the edit command, the drive is locked. Ugly sucker!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Well, I changed my sound system with another, and the problem is still there, so I guess the next thing to do is to install a dedicated digital audio card and see if the problem still persists. If that doesn't work, I'll pull it all apart and change the CPU. I've saved that for last, because it's the most work, and I'm not sure if the CPU is any good, as it came out of a blown motherboard. I didn't even realize that I had it as it was still in the motherboard socket. It doesn't seem to matter what the media is, and it does the same thing when talking on Yahoo messenger. It sound for all the world like a stuck CD, repeating the same sound very rapidly, like a machine gun and then continuing on. There's an awful lot of electronic noises that occur at random, but never occur in the same places, so I figure that I can discount the media entirely.

Stay Tuned,
Russ

 

yeah that doesn't sound like the media at all; my money's on the cpu.

 

A bad cpu causes an audio problem only? That would be pretty strange indeed :/

 

Red_Maw,
My money was too! I got up enough energy this morning to put the AM2 3800+ lima in it, and then the 630 Quad! Verdict is the motherboard. I've changed everything there is to change with known good components, and it still does the same thing. That motherboard was discontinued very early on, and now I'm really beginning to wonder why. There's nothing left to change but the Case and fans. I took the CPU, Memory, PSU, and ODD out of Oxi, and installed the spare 7300GTS video card. I have an HDD Pre-loaded with XP, actually I have two. 1 for Intel and 1 for AMD! That doesn't leave very much doubt!

I think given the economy right now, it's not a good time to be buying Computer components. In the past 2 months I've had 5 motherboards with problems besides my own. 1 Gigabyte, 1 Foxconn, 1 Asrock and 2 Biostars. I also had an Asus that was 3 months old that I didn't build, someone wanted me to replace under warranty because he couldn't locate the builder. I told him that I had no way that I could do that. All were brand new builds, less than a couple of months old. All of them had problems that seem to relate to third party components, like sound chips, on board video, Lan chips, and stuff like that. Realtek, J.Micron, Intel, AMD/Ati, nVidia, you name it! It seems like many of the manufacturers are trying to save money. After going over all the motherboard reviews, it seems that the failure rate is going up for all of them! I even replaced a CPU mount on a 5 month old Asus AMD motherboard. It broke the plastic cooler mount on one side. He said he heard this loud snap and the computer blue screened! I guess even the plastic quality is going down because I've never had to replace one of those before. It appears that everybody is cutting corners these days! Not a good sign at all!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

All PC components are badly made, with almost no exceptions at all. This has been the case for the duration of my life spent working with computers, though admittedly it pales in comparison to yours. I put it down to everything being built in China by slave labour. You've presumably heard about the suicide nets Foxconn installed to their offices?

 

I really should look at the glass as half full...

 

Oman7,
I'm with you there! Helps preserve the sanity! I also can't blame Gigabyte for a bad Realtek sound chip, and I think I was more than thorough enough in my testing as to eliminate anything else.

Russ

 

For sure the chances are that you will see a few dead parts here and there. But PC parts as a whole being badly made? I don't see it so broadly. Electronic parts on this scale are highly complex and it's only natural they would have a higher failure rate. A lot of that can be attributed to cutting corners, but most of it is the law of averages. Gigabyte boards still seem universally nice. It is indeed not Gigabyte's fault for bad 3red party chips. Realtek is well established and should better control their product quality.

 

Thanks for pointing out robocopy creaky, it is a great time saver. Used it for my backup this evening and it worked almost flawlessly. Only problem I ran into is it tried to copy of the system volume information and ended up in a loop since it didn't have permission.