Kurogane’s Anime Blog

The story goes like this…

The other day, I bought 2 x 1GB sticks of Crucial Ballistix RAM from Shawty (popular seller in LYN forums). Got the RAM yesterday, then took it to test on my new rig today. Booted up fine with all 4 sticks. Then decided to test with only the Ballistix. Guess what? The POST BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP of Doom struck. orz.

“Fine,” I thought, “Might have seated the RAM’s wrongly.”, so I reseated the RAM’s. POST BEEP of Doom again.

“Right, calm down…. let me try with the other slots.”, so I changed the slots pairing from 1-3 to 2-4. POST BEEP of Doom again.

“Shit, this looks bad.”, so I changed to the original sticks of Corsair Twin2x XMS RAM. Tried with 1-3 and 2-4. POST BEEP’s of Doom again.

“Oh f-ck, not good.”, so I reset the CMOS twice and tested with different set each CMOS clear. POST BEEP’s of Doom again.

“Great.”, so I tested the sticks INDIVIDUALLY, on each INDIVIDUAL slots.

16 POST BEEP’s of Doom (4 sticks x 4 slots) later, “F*ck, this is bad. real bad.”, so I asked for riku2replica’s(LYN forumer and friend) help to eliminate the RAM as the cause. All the RAM’s worked fine on his PC.

“Sigh… looks like my mobo is f***ed.” Called jy14(the original seller) to RMA the board and he said it takes 2 weeks.

So, there is how I killed my mobo in just one month of setting it up, har har har. Thank god the mobo is still in RMA period.

Moral of the story: Shit happens.

Oh, i’m taking the chance to sell my current casing as well, the LYN thread is here. You can also contact me directly via email if you want to buy it (no outstation buyers, thanks).

So I updated my Vista rig to SP1. Guess what happened afterwards..

Take a close look at the RAM….

… apparently Vista SP1 gives me 900% more RAM. Too bad it’s not 180GB, or I’d be able to say, “It’s over 9000%!”

Apart from that, nothing major I feel from the SP1 upgrade, probably because I don’t use it as my main.

After nearly a 15 hour marathon of setting up my new PC, Vista finally prevailed over XP and saved my day!

First a recap. I’ve been planning to assemble together a new PC to complement my current rig, an old but reliable 478′er Prescott (haha). After nearly a year of skimping and saving, I managed to buy the components piece by piece and finally, yesterday, I took the big leap. Here’s the rig specs:

Intel Core2Duo E4500 = RM 380
2 x 1GB Corsair Twin2X DDR2 = RM250
DFI INFINITY P965-S = RM 550
Sapphire HD3870 = RM 660
Silverstone Strider ST56F = RM 320
Seagate 7200.10 320GB = RM 230
Encloxure Shinobi SH09A = RM 140
Total = RM 2305

I started the assembling all the components at 9, after a good night’s sleep, and finished it at 12, after some mishaps :(. So anyways, with the board POST’ed up, I proceeded to install XP SP2 on it, but the snag came at installing ATI’s Catalyst driver, where I tried not only with the provided drivers, but also their latest 8.3 and 8.2 versions, all of which caused XP to BSOD itself upon loading. Wasted around 12 hours trying to get it work, in the end, I tried Vista.

And lo and behold! Catalyst 8.3 installed perfectly on Vista, giving me 4.4 on the Windows Experience Index, plus giving me my first taste of the Windows Aero theme, and I must say, god damn, it’s beautiful. Definitely didn’t expect to see Vista actually making me go over the moon in happiness, considering the amount of bad rep I’ve been exposed to of it, but I’ll say, it ain’t that bad after all!

Anyways, retiring for a good rest first, before proceeding to play around more with my new rig.

EDIT: I’m selling off my new D-Link KVM switch, since it can’t support my keyboard well. Any local readers interested? :P