Lupin

Well after 2 ½ years and god knows how much money. My car is “almost” finished.

It’s been a long road, sometimes with things happening very slowly, some times so quick I didn’t know it happened.

After buying the car untouched, and intending to leave it that way, it all fell apart after only a short amount of time. Then the worst thing happened, I got a company car. This meant that I didn’t need to worry about the time it took to do things, letting the car sit for weeks in various states of pulled-apart-ness just meant that I could take my time and do things that I wouldn’t normally do. Of course this means that its now not the most user friendly thing to drive everyday. But it’s still comfortable enough to drive to Melbourne and back.

So what now? Well use it. It’s looking at a full year of motor sport and morotkarnas and god knows what else along the way.

Here are some pics of the process for your enjoyment.

The gigabeast lives.

Well finally after much torture my new pc is up and running.

Basic specs are.

Amd Dual core. 3800
Gig of Kinston Ram
Gigabyte M55 SLI 4 Mobo
2 x Gigabyte 7600GT’s
200g Sata II
Audigy 4
And a big ass Gigabyte Aurora.

Now on with all the problems.

Once it was home it was time to put it all together and get into some SLI heaven.

Then the shit hit the fan.

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Well its time for me to embark on the crazy thing that is building your own PC, and what a pain in the ass exercise it is.

As I want to do this for as close to $1000 as possible, it means that there has to be a lot of research into building the thing. This is basically phase one of the build with the purchase of the basic components to do the job then adding to it towards the end of this year or early next, as the funds decided.

My 1st problem is that I need a new everything. Wanting to change the way a few things are done in my PC and having a slightly different idea to what’s needed to other people.
To me one of the most highly over-rated things in a pc today is the processor. Careful selection of the correct processor will go along way to saving you some cash. Working out which lower spec processor is in fact the same thing as a much higher clocked one just makes sense to me.

The other area where I don’t skimp on anything is with video card memory. Sure it’s nice to have dual 999999,000000 XT GTS PHD’S but if they only have 128mg of memory they are going to suffer. That’s why I’m more than happy to go to a slightly lower spec card with more memory. So no matter what I decide it will be a card with 512 on board. Maybe even two.

So basically my new PC will consist of parts that are about 3 rungs down from the top of the ladder, but I believe that it will perform better than something that a shop will build you for twice the dollars.

My only concern is going SLI and loosing dual monitors. What the hell are NVIDIA thinking?

I’ve had a few strange windows things happening lately. Namely auto play totally fucking up. With no apparent fix. What I thought was 1st a memory error came back to haunt me. And with ML just around the corner I thought it might be time for a clean up.

So I back up everything I can think of to another drive, and decided to make the change to xp64. As I’m not one to format / reinstall at the drop of a hat, my install is nearly 2 years old. So I decided to make the plunge.

The install went sweet, but when it came to get all the info back that’s where the problems started. I had backed up all the info to a drive that was on my raid controller. XP did not detect the raid controller, no big deal, Ill just head off to the gigabyte site and grab it.

Then problem 1 arises. XP didn’t pick up my LAN card. So a quick cable swap fixes that. So I start downloading the RAID drivers. Install them and still nothing. Then after a bit more of a look I find they are the SATA RAID drivers. So where the hell are the IDE RAID ones? After a lot of looking and forum searching, it appears that they just decided not to make them as most people use SATA. Well I have 3 drives that are on my raid, so I need them to work.

The short work around was to swap the IDE’s around to put them all on the one controller and stick in my old IDE card.

So now it looks like I have to use some open source drivers to get my IDE raid working

Seriously how do people do it?

I’ve just come from a 2hour meeting with the owner of the place, 2 of the other managers, the I.T. “Guru” who they were getting in to do all the work and me.

Basically the meeting was to discuss the building and roll out of the new server. We are currently on a windows NT server that is just about to crap its self. So the “guru” is looking at getting a new server to meet our needs and then some. Now I could clearly see that this guy is just there to fill his pockets with as much cash as he can, and this doesn’t really worry me, because it means that its going to be his ass on the line when it all goes wrong, and it will.

There were a couple of things that concerned me. One that he had not contacted out ISP to discuss swapping the mail over to an internal server and 2 that he said there is no way we can add wireless to the site.

There were a couple of other things in the meeting that didn’t quite jell like him saying that only he could so the setup of the server and the 20 or so workstations we have.
Then after the meeting why we were discussing something else, (the screwed over network layout) he then takes me aside and tells me, not to do too much work as the boss wont call him. WTF that’s the whole reason he’s paying me the extra $$$’s so he doesn’t have to call the guy.

Now I can’t wait to see the next meeting as the owner has told me that I am to do as much as I can without getting him involved.

Its got me fucked how some of you deal with all this kind of shit everyday.