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Related: Culture Forums, Support ForumsI really went and did it this time.
Over the last 3 months I've been slowly gathering the parts and pieces for a new computer. That's just how I do it- I don't BUY 'puters, I BUILD 'em.
Well, I ordered the final part last weekend- a $200 Asus motherboard, and it appeared upon my doorstep yesterday. Since I had already backed everything up in anticipation of the Grand Event, I opened up The Beast last night and stripped its guts out and started building the new one. It took about an hour all told (not bad at all), and before I went to bed I had Windoze (7, not 8. Never 8!) installed and updated. This morning I started restoring all my cool junk and reinstalling all my software, and by noon I was pretty much done with The Project!
Now for the geekspeak: it's an Asus Maximus VI Hero DDR3 2800 LGA 1150 Motherboard with a 4th Generation Intel Core i7 processor. I'm starting it out with 16GB of memory, plus a shiny new 1TB hard drive. (My first computer was a 486/SX with 4 MB of memory, a 240MB hard drive, and it had DOS 6.2 and Windoze 3.1. Two weeks after I bought it I had taken it apart and put it back together just for the hell of it.)
Although it's a gamer's board, I'm not a gamer- I bought it for the speed and flexibility so I could more easily work on my computer art. I simply wanted the latestgreatest, and dammit I GOT it.
Damn, I'm good.
CaliforniaPeggy
(149,514 posts)Damn, you ARE good!
I am so happy to hear about your new machine! Of course, I don't follow half of the geekspeak, but that's OK.
I too have Windows 7 on both my desktop and my laptop...NEVER Win 8.
Have a ball, and I know you will!
Paulie
(8,462 posts)Don't know how ya live in 16gigs of ram but more power to ya if ya can swing it.
(I run my VMware training lab as vm's including the esxi hosts then the VMs inside the vm hypervisor. Even the NAS/iscsi servers are VMs. Layers within layers). 32 gig is barely enough, but my iMac can't go above 32.
My first PC was a 386sx with 640 ram plus 256k expanded memory (not extended) on a card with chips. Main ram was SIPPs which where horrible!
Prisoner_Number_Six
(15,676 posts)I've been living on 4gb for six years, and it's never been quite enough. My old mobo is still good, so I plan to stuff it into another case at some point, but it'll go to someone who doesn't need latestgreatest to get along
As a computer repair geek and pack-rat, I've been collecting memory chips for years- I'm sure I have a box somewhere with a bunch of old SIPPS chips entombed within.
jakeXT
(10,575 posts)Windows 7 Home Premium 16 GB
Windows 7 Home Basic 8GB
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa366778%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
Prisoner_Number_Six
(15,676 posts)32gb is the mobo's limit, not windoze.
Oops. There goes my technorep.
jakeXT
(10,575 posts)Still, I'm surprised about the low values of Home and Basic (16 GB and 8 GB)
IrishAyes
(6,151 posts)I'd try to follow in your footsteps, except if I built a computer it would look like the wife of Frankenstein's Monster - and work just about as well. I totally envy your talent and wish you were my brother so I could hornswoggle you into making me such a computer.
csziggy
(34,131 posts)The hardest part is selecting the components to make sure they go together and to get the best price breaks. Just about everything is plug and play and most motherboard manuals come with really good illustrations to show what to plug into where.
It was a whole lot harder to build a computer back with 286 computers. The hard drives had to be defined in the BIOS - and sometimes that information was not easy to come by. I learned how to build computers by taking old dead computers, scavenging parts and making working ones from the odds and ends. I wouldn't want to do that again but it was a fun project while it lasted.
IrishAyes
(6,151 posts)the knowledge that you could overcome. As an Irish-American I don't suffer from any crippling overall inferiority complex, and I'm usually pretty good at stuff. But I can tell you that the two times I tried to assemble a swag lamp kit, I blew them out. The concept and directions seemed crystal clear, and I was confident that I'd done such a simple operation correctly. But you can't argue with two disasters like that.
While I'd like to blame the situation on severe dyslexia, it seems best to reserve that excuse for special occasions which catch me off guard. Can't claim I'm not forewarned about anything remotely electrical. So I stick to plugging in and unplugging, turning on and off, and operating - nothing more. Back in the stone age I learned DOS easily and once even knew how to code. Don't ask me why I can't assemble a swag lamp kit.
csziggy
(34,131 posts)It's so easy to get hot and neutrals mixed up! Give me something more complex and I am pretty good at it. I have trouble with a simple light switch, but three way switches, no sweat -
Prisoner_Number_Six
(15,676 posts)I did it all the hard way- a lot of hands-on plus a few classes and a bunch of reading. Anyone can do it.
And I've done more than a little unpaid repair work over the years- it helps build the rep and it gets me referrals. It's how I built my business.
IrishAyes
(6,151 posts)csziggy
(34,131 posts)As technology changes it's hard to stay up to date.
And please don't tell me about unpaid repair work. These days I try to keep it to a minimum and stay away from the hardware parts. The guy that assembled my computer is a strong progressive and I try to send business his way. Since I'm not interested in doing it for a living, I'd rather let him do it.
I still help friends with simple computer stuff - this afternoon I spent five hours helping a friend get her software and printer installed on her new computer. It would have been a lot easier if she had the discs for the software. We spent nearly two hours waiting for printer drivers and Office 2010 to download. At least that gave us time to catch up with what we've been doing.
R B Garr
(16,950 posts)I still have absolutely no idea what you all are actually saying.
Actually, a couple weeks ago our HP desktop had a fan failure notice and it shut down immediately. I thought that's it, game over for the computer, but my SO said he could open the computer up and clean the fan. I thought to myself, You can do that? He reminded me that people even build their own computers so cleaning a fan is not unthinkable. It worked, too. The computer is fine now.
I'll have to show him your thread. He'll be impressed!
Congratulations on your new machine. Sounds impressive.
csziggy
(34,131 posts)But I had someone else assemble it for me since I didn't have full use of my left hand at the time.
I needed something better for Photoshop work and scanning - my old computer kept giving me errors when I scanned dozens of old photos and documents at high resolutions - I'd scan them into Photoshop, then there wasn't enough memory to save the darned things!
So I went with:
ASUS M5A99X EVO Motherboard with 1 AMD FX-8320 Vishera 3.5GHz and 32 GB RAM
1 ASUS GT640-2GD3 GeForce GT 640 2GB Video Card
Kingston HyperX 3K SH103S3/120G 2.5" 120GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) (2 of these, one for the OS and the other for the Photoshop scratch disk!)
I moved my 3 terrabyte hard drive with my data into the new computer, then added a faster 4 terrabyte drive to speed up saving large image files. Put Windows 7 Pro on it to handle the 32 GBs of RAM.
I'm having no problems scanning, editing and saving huge files - even when I am working with uncompressed TIFFs for archival use!
My first computer was an Apple ][ with 48 kb memory! I've come a long way from that thing.
My Good Babushka
(2,710 posts)Can you build an automaton that writes blank verse and sighs with recognizable ennui? Post pictures!
Prisoner_Number_Six
(15,676 posts)I'll call it "The Beatnik Box".
eppur_se_muova
(36,246 posts)I started out doing SETI@home, and now do GIMPS (you could try using some of that RAM on P-1 factoring during off-hours). folding@home has a number of participants on DU.
Prisoner_Number_Six
(15,676 posts)It's a worthy cause, but it slowed my computer down too much when I was doing other memory-intensive stuff. Now may be a good time to give it another go!
eppur_se_muova
(36,246 posts)I seldom notice GIMPS is running in the background. Only "P-minus-one" and large ECM jobs really use a lot of RAM, and you can restrict such jobs to run only at certain times, or not at all. You can simply restrict the type of jobs to be run -- trial factoring, for example, uses minimal resources. The documentation is pretty good. After reading the readme file, you might want to glance at the whatsnew and undoc files. The undoc file describes some more customizable options which allow you to avoid conflict with other RAM-intensive programs.
Prime95 was created by George Woltman, a retired Intel engineer, and he has fine-tuned the program to make P95 as trouble-free as possible. Updates are issued regularly (mostly to optimize performance for newer processors), but are not automatic.
If you decide to try Prime95, let me make one suggestion: after downloading the software (mersenne.org), disconnect your computer from the Internet before running Prime95 for the first time; this will stop it from automatically downloading work assignments. Then run the Torture Test for a few hours at least to make sure your RAM is not prone to errors. While that runs, you can read the documentation and decide what kind of work you want to do. Look through all the menu options to see what variations are available, and start out with something that won't take a long time or much memory (say, trial factoring to low limits with one day of work queued up) and reconnect to your network. Then, when you end the torture test, Prime95 will automatically connect to the server and download an appropriate work assignment.
If you decide you don't want to use Prime95, there is a "Quit GIMPS" option which will cancel all your work assignments, and the uninstaller runs cleanly. You can also cancel single work assignments.
(Obviously, I favor GIMPS. I quit running SETI@home when I learned that much of the CPU effort was expended on the graphics display. Of course, that was a long time ago, and I was using the screen saver mode. I suspect things are much improved now.)
malthaussen
(17,175 posts)My first computer was an Apple II+ with 48 K -- that's kilobytes, you understand, youngsters -- of RAM. But 48 k wasn't enough, so I bought an additional 48 k to hand-install in the box. The computer cost... wait for it... $2500 in 1980 dollars, and the additional memory cost $500. Or at least it did at the shop a "friend" advised me to use.
Well, I'm sorry to say it but it's true. I installed that 48 k backwards, and burned out all 16 chips. So I visited the local store -- not the one my "friend" had advised -- and picked up another 48 k. For $250. This time, I installed it correctly.
It was a cutting-edge machine! I had a 300 baud modem! That cost $500, too.
My current box I had assembled at the local store so I could keep XP instead of paying the licensing fee for Vista. Now, alas, it looks like it might be time to assemble a new one.
-- Mal
IrishAyes
(6,151 posts)it seemed a wonder to behold. Why, you could set a problem for it at night, go to bed, and next morning there was your answer!
sendero
(28,552 posts).... IO for nothing and your MIPS for free.
Every time I have bought a ready made computer (only twice) I have regretted it. This one seemed fine, until I used it a while and the registry got big and now it is a boat anchor.
I'm going to suffer with this brick for another year or two (I'm cheap that way and besides it IS a lot of work to reinstall everything and move all of the data files) and then I'm going to do what you just did
Prisoner_Number_Six
(15,676 posts)Funny how it works out- MTV actually did us all a favor by jumping the shark- now we have YouTube, which besides having all the music videos on the planet is also F R E E.
There's some real zen in there someplace. I like it.
sendero
(28,552 posts).... get a blister on your thumb installing all your apps
mnhtnbb
(31,371 posts)NutmegYankee
(16,199 posts)ASUS P9X79 Motherboard
Core i7-4930K Six-Core 3.40Mhz <----Liquid cooled!
16 GB of ram
480 GB Solid State SATA drive (primary)
500 GB 10,000 RPM SATA Drive
1 TB 7000 RPM SATA Drive
2 AMD R9 270X MSI TwinFrozr graphics cards
Windows 7 Pro
And yes, this was for gaming.
Prisoner_Number_Six
(15,676 posts)I haven't had the chance to play with one yet- still too expensive to consider getting one.
NutmegYankee
(16,199 posts)A restart takes 10 seconds and the desktop programs load instantly. Once I double click iTunes, it loads within a second and is ready to use. Program installs are mere seconds.
I bought the Corsair Neutron drive. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233516
I also have a corsair cooler, power supply and their vengeance ram.