March 8, 2009
It is a Computor!
So! I built a computer! Hurrah!
I told you I was going to, didn’t I? And dammit, I did. And I was much less frustrated putting the thing together. It all worked like clockwork, hardware-wise. I made it all happen without any frustration. I guess I did learn something from my expletive-inducing experience building Jonathan’s computer.
But yeah, hardware? No frustration. I had much easier parts, too, so that helped. No, the frustration came from installing Windows. Brer, in an effort to make things easy for me, lead me to this “Johnny’s Ultimate Windows XP” distro, a custom built distro that was supposed to have all the drivers and such already built in. And it did! But it also decided that it wanted to have “cosmetic enhancements.” Things are renamed for no reason, icons are changed, all kinds of bullshit is tweaked. The benefits of not having to install SATA drivers and have it automagically install AVG is, perhaps, not worth the frustration of fixing everything of those. Still, if those don’t bother you, the distro works fine, installed great, and I’m already up and running, having most everything already fixed and set up. It’s nice.
Of course, though, the weekend when I build my new power machine, Steam goes on the fritz, so I can’t test it in any new games. All of the games have downloading issues and half the time, when I launch them, it says they are “unavailable.” It’ll be fixed after this UT3 free weekend is over and the servers stop getting pounded, I’m sure, but it’s just kinda frustrating. I want to see what the new machine can do!
What it can do, though, is be REALLY fucking quiet. Every time I walk into the room now, I fear that my computer has been shut off. My last computer was pretty loud. I got used to it, of course, being in the same room as it the majority of my days. But compared to this box, it was screaming all the time. I think the big difference is, instead of many little loud fans, the box has one huge fan on the side, which works quieter because it’s bigger? I guess? But seriously, it’s silent. It’s kinda cool.
Anyway, Yuuko-san is up and running. (My last computer was Tomoyo-chan, so I decided to keep the “naming after CLAMP characters” convention.) And I barely had to ask anyone for help to make it happen. Huzzah for me!