What did you do when you smelled "Victory"!!??

[Worf101]

My ole lady scoffed, my 11 year old shook his head in disbelief. The dining room table was covered in manuals and boxes. It looked liked somebodied tossed a grenade in a CompUsa and ran for cover. Downloaded "how to's" and manuals written in bad English. They swore I'd never get it to work. My fingers are too large, my hands are too big, I sweat too much... all the odd's were agains't me. They expected me to take the whole pile to the local puter shop when I failed to get it together...

After 2.5 days of on again off again building, I crossed my fingers and pressed the "on" button. The LED's glowed a lovely shade of blue... and the screen flashed black and white. Bill Gates appeared and demanded I bow down and render unto Caeser but the machine was working...

I patted my brow with a greasy sweat rag and lit a Cuesta Churchill Cigar the size of a small torpedo... Victory... The fishwife came in and said... "My that looks beautiful" I just grinned. Junior said... "cool beans Dad, can you build me one?" I nooded sagely... I felt like Spartacus, Willie Mays and Michael Jordan, John Elway after "the Drive"... Master of the Universe...

How did you feel after you built your first/last or any rig and how did you Celebrate?

AMD Athalon 64Fx-53
HIS Excalibur X800 XT PE with IceQ II Cooling
Asus A8V Deluxe VIA K8T800 Pro Chipset ATX AMD MB
1 Gig of OCZ 3500 unbuffered Ram
2 Western Digital 74 Gig Raptors in Raid 1
DVD ASUS 16X DVD
DVD+/-RW PLEXTOR|PX-712A
CPU FAN Thermaltake Silentboost K8
Cooler Master Wave Master Case
Antec NeoPower 480 Watt PSU
SB Audigy 2Z Platinum Sound Card

Da Worfster


If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything.

 

[fishmahn]

Congo-rats

Hmmm... How did I feel after building my first real 'from the ground up machine'?... relief.

I installed Civilization and played a while...

Mike.

 

[sobelizard]

Nice story...very entertaining.

My first succesful build? 1990; freshman year of college - Pretty much got drunk and shagged my girlfriend. Then played fractris until I needed glasses. What memories...

<font color=green><b><i>Lizards</font color=green></b> do <b>not</b> taste like <b><font color=yellow>chicken</font color=yellow></b>,<b> <font color=yellow>chicken</font color=yellow></b> tastes like <font color=green><b>lizard.</b></font color=green></i>

 

[Lazerous]

Still working on it....

I'll have to get back to you. LOL

But the process is going good so far. I bit off a pretty big chunk since I also decided to do every aspect of the MOD including resleeving all the PSU wires, case MOD, lighting, ETC..... There won't be a single wire in this case that isn't sleeved and neatly secured inside when I'm done. Slapping the Parts on the mobo is the easy part. LMAO!!!

BTW, Its feels great so far but once it's running I'm sure it will be awesome.

<font color=green>AMD 64 3700+
ASUS K8N-E Deluxe
CORSAIR XMS (1gb) PC-3200
Gigabyte GF 6800gt 256mb
Audigy 2 ZS
2_36.7gb Raptors/Raid 0
Tt 480 watt PSU</font color=green>

 

[petrolhead2003]

I have similar experiences.

Apparently i RUINED christmas due to my bad attitude caused by a motherboard replacement that would not work(4pin 12v supply not on my old PSU) because i did'nt have a newer the correct PSU.

Unfortunately, i tried(purchased)2 new cpu's,1 new graphics card,1 new ddr module before finding out that i needed a different PSU.

The new year went much better after i purchased a new PSU and had sold the 'extra' cpu's,the shop took the rest back(nice people).

The looks that the missus was shooting me during christmas were real bad,i was a miserable fooker.the hardware was beating me for a while.

Anyway,were going to have christmas on another day.......
I can't wait.... ....


14 days into the new year:-

Got me new 754upgrade module,new cpu turning up tomorrow,heatsink coming from ebay next week(i won't be able to wait if i get the cpu tomorrow,i'll goto pcworld and get one in the morning).
Unfortunately i need to update the bios on my MBoard and change over about 12 jumpers.

mmmmmmmm.

What's the chance of me having a good weekend?

All together now...
"Allways look on the bright side of life....dada....dadada.....

 

[Crashman]

I started repairing computers after an accident during a monitor adjustment. The monitor in question had no external width controls, so I had to open it up and use the pots on the circuit board. I got the screwdriver a little too close to something of high voltage, and BANG! The screwdriver shot across the room. Parts inside the computer started failing, first the video card, then the hard drive controller, etc etc.

So my first experience was, er shocking! And it left me shaken!

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[Lazerous]

Your name is apropos then!

<font color=green>AMD 64 3700+
ASUS K8N-E Deluxe
CORSAIR XMS (1gb) PC-3200
Gigabyte GF 6800gt 256mb
Audigy 2 ZS
2_36.7gb Raptors/Raid 0
Tt 480 watt PSU</font color=green>

 

[Crashman]

The experience wasn't simply stunning, it was electifying!

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[Atolsammeek]

I started building computer when my brother started working. This was in the 1980. And he started going to tech school. And learn everything about computers. Then got a job with a Lab not working on computer unless employees needed help. Now He ask me questions on what to do. For I like buying parts and building computers.

So my frist computer was when my brother could not fix. And I fix it.

 

[Worf101]

Nice responses.. except mabbe for Crashman's exploits, and there's nothing more satisfying than playing Doc Frakenstein.. at least to me that is...

Da Worfster

If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything.

 

[Lazerous]

OK!!!! I'm getting back to this question now! I just got this sucker up and running today. Right at the moment I am feeling pretty great! The system is fast, fast, fast!!!

A couple hours ago however I was not only scratching my head but damn near went bald in the process. Lemme tell you what happened. You are gonna laugh.! :lol:

OK. I did quite a bit of modding before I actually assembled all the hardware. Everything went well except for a couple minor problems, which I rectified. so I stayed up late l;ast night working on the HW assembly and wiring. I got most of the stuff hooked up and some cable management done. I hit it fresh this morning(late morning) and finally came the moment of truth. I had no problems setting up the bios and the Sil3114 raid controllers, configuring the drives for RAID0. I changed my boot order and began SP2 installation. When it got to 43% on the copying files stage I got a message that it couldn't find the file "wscript.chm". OK, so I'm thinking to myself, WTF is this all about? It's a brand new copy of windows w/ SP2. Could the disk be bad? All the hardware is brand new, including the dvd-rom I am using to install this. So i try to skip that one file but that one was followed by file after missing file so I exited the installation. I tried to run setup again and much to my shegrin i get the notious NTLDR not found message and i can't get back to setup. Now the hair begins to slowly disappear.

I go back into the raid config and try deleting the current raid, formatting both drives and starting over again. Once this was done i rechecked the boot order and let her rip once again, this time to be greeted by a message telling me to restart, recheck my boot sequence or check to make sure boot media is inserted into the drive. This I did but to no avail, same message.

*thought wander in my head and I begin to think. Can this copy of windows be bad? Is there a bad HDD? None of it made any sense. So finally I said <b><i>FI</i></b>!!! I grabbed my DVD-RW drive from my old puter and plugged it into the new rig.

<b><font color=red>VOILA!!!</font color=red></b> Windows setup came back and this time went down without a hitch! After all the files copied over to install windows it took exactly 7 minutes and Windows XP was installed. 4 minutes to copy the neccesary files over so a total of 11 minutes and it was a done deal! WHEW!!!!

I was almost starting to get panicky! ROFL....
Can you believe that? A brand new frickin dvd-rom and it blows a cork at the most inopertune time? Anyone ever have that happen to them?

Well thats my story and I'm sticking to it. Profanity was witheld to protect the innocent. I am sure happy I solved that without days of turmoil leading up to meltdown. LOL

<font color=blue>I love it!</font color=blue><font color=red><b> WhooooHooooo!!!!!!!!!!!</b></font color=red>

<i>I will post pics when I get the film developed.</i>

<font color=green>AMD 64 3700+
ASUS K8N-E Deluxe
CORSAIR XMS (1gb) PC-3200
Gigabyte GF 6800gt 256mb
Audigy 2 ZS
2_36.7gb Raptors/Raid 0
Tt 480 watt PSU</font color=green>
<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by lazerous on 01/23/05 04:48 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Worf101]

Great recount and even better "kick save". Nothing better than a little "creative problem solving". My wife wonders why I keep all those old puter parts hanging round. Never, ever know when you might need sumthin. Congrats...

Da Worfster

If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything.

 

[prolfe]

My first PC was a 486SX25 with 2 whole megabytes of memory! Anyway I did everything but put a new mobo in that thing; so when the time came for a new PC it was rather anticlimactic. I was awed by the power of my new ATI xpert98, however, and played FF7 until my eyes glazed over.....or was it until Win98 crashed.....not sure which came first.