Vindauga

Recently I have been feeling that my home computer just wasn’t up to snuff; I couldn’t run the newest games at anything close to full bore. So, I’ve been dreaming about installing a new processor. Not the best dream I have ever had.At first I was only going to upgrade the processor but once I started looking it became clear that installing a new processor would only give a slight boost to performance; the motherboard simply couldn’t manage a significant increase. So, I was going to have to start looking for motherboards too. I’ve never been a real computer guru. I’ve always sat somewhere between the uninitiated and the those with the keys to the castle. Over the past several years I’ve recognized that my ability to fix computers has been sliding farther and farther away. So, it was no great surprise to me that when I started looking for a new processor I had to struggle to understand what the various components were. Serial ATA PCIe are terms that had no meaning for me. I decided that the best way to proceed was to purchase a motherboard manufactured by the same company that made the board currently in the machine.

HP was kind enough to provide me with that information. Asus became my board of choice. But comparing prices of the various boards it suddenly seemed silly not to get a dual-core chip as well; the price differences were nearly non-existent. I wasn’t going for the high-end freak out system, I just wanted a little bump, something that would let me machine be competitive for another couple of years. Luckily, because of some general fear about the rapidly changing computer world, I started looking at what all the various plugs and sockets were on the Asus dual-core boards I was specing out in relation to the board I currently had. It turns out that Asus isn’t making, at least not in area I was looking, boards that have AGP slots anymore; they are going straight PCIe. PCIe sounds great, now that I understand what it is, but I already have a video card that is AGP and, as I said, I didn’t want this to be a complete overhaul. So, The Asus boards were suddenly out of the running.

I had to find a new first choice. I returned to pricing stuff out, looked at which boards were being sold, and then for no particularly good reason decided I would focus on the MSI boards. So, I oogled and fantasized for a while and then finally broke down and ordered a board. I bought it from a company called PartsPC; they seemed reputable, had a good deal, and the website allowed for alterations of the package. I ordered it, a MSI KVGM-V motherboard, an AMD Athlon64 X2 3800+ processor, and 1 gig of ram.

About a day after I ordered the goods I got a phone call from PartsPC. They wanted to let me know that everything was okay with my order; everything that is, except that the processor I purchased was back-ordered. But, for a mere $15 more I could get the AMD Athlon64 X2 4200+ processor. After harassing the poor man for a while about how this whole process was sketchy and had the appearance of being a bait and switch, I admitted that I would rather have my stuff sooner than later and $15 was a small price to pay for that privilege. I got my stuff a week later. And this is where the real fun began.

The procedure of ripping out my machines innards and replacing them took surprisingly little time; only about 2 hours all told (which I think is good considering that I haven’t torn a computer down in over 5 years). I ran into the same problem I always used to run into, which is that I am never 100% certain where all the little cables go that come from the front of the machine. This was exacerbated this time because the HP had so much other stuff on the front side, including that memory card reader which will read every kind of memory card imaginable. But there were other, stranger problems; like, MCI thought it would be useful to have the audio jacks 1 millimeter closer to the mouse port than the other motherboard. They were kind enough though to include a new faceplate for the back of the machine. Installing the Processor on the board was a breeze as was the gigantor cooling thingamabob [that last word, by the way, isn't tripping the spellcheck]. I’m a little uncertain if I need to have both the 20 pin power cable connected as well as the strange and new 4 pin square connector but they are. But I do have one big problem though, which I completely overlooked when investigating the board, the new board has only one IDE connector whereas the old board had two. This is not usually an issue, even considering that my machine had both a DVD player as well as a CDR, I could just disconnect one of them. But, because of the internal architecture, I couldn’t connect the HDD and the DVD on the same cable (unless there is some crazy long IDE cable out there that I have never seen). The new board however has two Serial ATA ports, which now gives me both the impetus and the direction for getting a new hard drive (I’ve been looking at them, they are so stupid cheap, but wasn’t sure about the whole EIDE versus Serial ATA thing). There are still a couple of little cables hanging loose, but I don’t know what they go to and can’t find a connection on the board that seems to fit them, so with the hardware installation complete I decided to turn it on.

It booted up straight away. I went into the BIOS and fixed the time (it came from California after all) and then it was off to the operating system to see the power and the glory of the new chipset. Up came the windows logo screen and then…it rebooted. It got back to the logo screen and then rebooted. I wasn’t terribly upset by this, I kind of expected something like this, only I didn’t seem to expect it enough to have my disks ready. This is a completely different board and processor, it only makes sense that some of the setup and drivers are out of whack. So, I dug out my windows install disk and here is where I think I made a wrong turn.

Software really has never been my thing. And it has been a long time since I needed to reinstall windows (since I got a pre-built machine I have never had any trouble with my operating system). I booted to the disk and told it to reinstall windows. Be calm, I didn’t have it format the drive. The install was quick and painless. Quick and painless until I booted to my fresh operating system and found that nothing, absolutely nothing was left of my old machine. I guess I needed to do some sort of recovery and not an install because I was looking at a machine that was newborn. My Documents was empty, which caused a couple of minutes of panic until I search the HDD and found my old documents hidden safely away. All of my files were still on the drive, all of my programs are present only now my computer doesn’t think they are there. This is disconcerting. I forgot how many things I don’t have disks for (my computer is an HP in appearance only now, which makes me wonder why I am bothering to save the recovery partition).

Not having your programs is annoying but can be remedied over time. In fact, its sort of a bonus, I don’t have to worry about all that nonsense I installed just to see how it worked; the system is much cleaner now. But there are a few things that are frustrating. Take for instance the fact that I have no earthly idea how my machine logs into my internet provider. Seriously, I have a cable modem that was set-up when I got the machine by the guy from the cable company and I have never changed it. So, I have no internet. But recognizing that led to a far more troublesome realization; with Thunderbird having to be reinstalled, all of my email was gone (thankfully, I found where that was hidden and recovered my email). I also lost all my music software, which is a bummer.

But, I installed all this new hardware so that I could play my video games at kick-ass resolutions and now my computer didn’t remember that I had any video games at all; it was like a damn amnesia victim. Worse, the prime motivator, Neverwinter Nights 2, refused to install because I didn’t have enough hard drive space left. It takes something stupid like 6 gigs to install (though it resides in less). I had 4 gigs left free on the machine (which I used to think was more space than I could use in a year) at least 6 gigs were already being taken up by NWN2 so none of those 4 gigs were going to be affected by a new install but NWN2 wasn’t hearing it. I had to delete a bunch of stuff just to get it installed. Great, but then the dumb thing wouldn’t install. It claim my CD key was invalid; I must have typed it in 20 times, I started to worry that I might have an unrecognized dyslexia. Worse, I started having Cartesian nightmares; what if I had been created in such a way that whenever I saw 2+3 I thought it equaled 6 instead of 5. I mean, what if I had a systematic error in my ability to recognize letter? Shouldn’t I then recognize the letters on my computer just as incorrectly and thereby type in the “right” code? I decided to check online. I bootlegged an internet connection from my neighbors using my laptop and logged into my account at Bioware, they let you log your CD key on their site. Yeah, it looked the same printed in my manual as it did online. Searching was in order. I thought briefly that it might be because I had already installed this key and that maybe it was recognizing the new processor as different machine and that I might be sharing this key with multiple users. But that didn’t make any sense, my computer didn’t have an internet connection and there was no way my disk had been updated. However, it turns out that NWN2 logs your CD key in an .ini file (which was not written over during the install process), which, it seems, was stopping my reinstall from accepting my key; it was already present.

Problem solved. Finally I would get to see how well the machine boosted performance. Only I can’t. the version of NWN2that I bought was early in the release, it was version .95 (it didn’t have the status of a 1.0 release). I know, from the first time I installed the game, that the first update requires a gigantic download (the game was severely bugged on initial release), a download that I can’t do because I have no internet connection. They are up to version 1.4 now and tons of the fixes are performance issues. So, I can’t look at the game and say if it is any better, not right now anyway. I tried anyway and it seemed better, but since it got reinstalled I can’t tell what my old settings were versus these new settings. So, at 4am, a mere 6 hours after starting the install process I went to bed with no clear idea of how much better my machine was. Yep, its a party in a box.

Knob, if you’ve made it this far, you will shortly be receiving an AMD 3800+ processor and motherboard with 512 ram on two dimms.