So, I hope this letter finds you in good spirits ’cause it sure has been dang long enough since I posted last. There’s been a lot to catch you up on around here. I’ll start with the end of July.

VBS was great, and feels like lightyears ago. I was a pirate and my name was “Captain Steve.” That’s over so don’t call me that anymore. That week we also thought we may have found a security threat at work. It turned out to be nothing more than misreading of some logs and a few very coincidental coincidences. That brings me to August.

August started pretty much with a bang. We had a breakfast morning at our house since my parents were out of town and I now my sister was itching for a party. Or something like that. It was great. We had a million different breakfast foods and had a lot of people there. It was a very cool and weird day to say the least (since Amanda decided to stay all day and clean out our fridge; weird :). The last two weeks have been pretty much a blur getting ready to get back to school. I leave on Saturday (or Sunday if they don’t let me move in Saturday night), and get to trek that 11 hours all by my lonesome. I actually like doing the trip by myself, unlike some people, because I get to put on my music and sing as loud as I dang well please. It’s awesome.

The Olympics have been awesome. I think I’ve been into it this year than I have in the past, and I haven’t really watched all that much of it. It’s probably because of the Michael Phelps amazingness.

My PC has undergone some crazy transformations lately. To start the ball rolling, I bought a Geforce 9600GT since it was the best bang for buck I could find. This card did better than the best Radeon 3000 series card, which is why I bought it. However, I forgot that my motherboard was made to be pretty strongly compatible with ATI cards. And then it happened. Freezes when I installed the new card. It worked on other Intel Chip machines, but anything that was AMD it would freeze. Not sure if the problem was compatibility or not, but it seemed like it. So, I took a motherboard I had lying around which didn’t work for my server. It happened to have a PCIE slot, SATA slots, Firewire (I’ll explain in a second), DDR2 memory, but only one IDE channel. So, I cannibalized my server, taking the Pentium 4 and DDR2 memory from it and putting it onto this new board with the new 9600GT. It worked! Couldn’t believe it. It gets better. When I put the Hard Drive back on it, Windows booted. As anyone knows when Windows gets a new motherboard/chipset/bus anything can happen, mostly crashes which means you basically only have one choice: reformat. That would’ve taken hours of installation and painstaking work to get everything back to the way I wanted. But, Windows booted. And, even better, it didn’t freeze. Upon installing the drivers, I was off to the races again, and tried the awesomeness of Call of Duty 4 at full graphics, full everything. Impressive. And at 40-50 fps, also. But to get my server back online I had to order a Pentium dual-core and 2 more gigs of DDR2 RAM. I also had problems with only one IDE channel since 2 Hard Drives and 2 Disk Drives were IDE. I bought a 500GB SATA to take the place of the 2 IDE Hard Drives and basically put a full computer together with the extra parts I had and sold it yesterday on eBay for $235. Not bad for a noticeable upgrade.

So now my build stands at this:

The greatest line in the whole movie as stated to the left in the movie poster. The Joker says it three times, each time with a greater level of creepiness and raw psychopathy. In fact, that describes his demeanor throughout the entire movie. Heath Ledger’s performance is phenomenal. Needless to say, Oscar-worthy. As everyone has said, every line out of Ledger’s mouth is a piece of gold, another piece of the puzzle into the psychopath that is The Joker.

It is an epic movie. Almost every scene is worthwhile. I say almost every scene only because there are 1 or 2 scenes that make me question, what’s it doing there? However, in Batman Begins (which I rewatched on Tuesday) there’s a lot more cheese in a lot of the police’s dialog, and there are a lot of scenes that just don’t fit the seriousness of the first movie. This movie does better at staying “serious.”

Problems? Even if a lot of people have a problem with Christian Bale’s voice being too raspy, that’s not what I had a problem with. My problem (aside from the damn audience clapping every two seconds at scenes you knew were coming) was that the city portrayed in the movie is not the Gotham from the first one. Different Wayne tower, no Narrows shown, and an overall different feel of the city. It’s almost as if they did not spend enough time trying to sync with the idea that we’re still in Gotham and not New York City, which I thought they pulled off very well in the first film. However, we do see some familiar stuff like “Lower” 8th street where in the first film Batman speeds back through after having saved Rachael from Dr. Crane.

Those nitpicks aside, this movie was incredulous. Two-Face’s CG was near perfect (a much more accurate interpretation than make-up). Action sequences were just thrilling, and coming back full circle, the greatest part of this movie was by far Heath Ledger as the Joker. I know I said it already, and I will say it again to anyone who asks. After all, we should all learn to lighten up these days. In the infamous words of the Joker, “Why so serious?”

Although there’s been complications with Brandon’s PC recently (static electricity frying of the motherboard scale), I have built another successful PC recently, though not without its troubles, as well.

This has been the most difficult build yet, but I find myself learning new stuff every time. I just recently got on board with the idea that you test to minimal build first, which although that’s by the book, I’ve been ignoring that cardinal rule lately, and it has gotten me into trouble (troubleshooting Brandon’s PC troubles took forever and a day).

So, we got the minimal up (fyi: minimal build here is PSU, mobo, processor, and ram) just to make sure we got power to the board. However, once we added the video card, we found we got no POST, which, in fact, was not a fault of the video card. In reality, we got no POST because of a bad stick of RAM which I again neglected to test. You see, the motherboard is supposed to beep at POST to announce a successful POST. With all four sticks of RAM in, it did not. I, however, ignored testing this which took only about a half hour to figure out. Easy enough. However, the rest is nightmare hell.

Let me point something out here that will help in understanding this. We had to put two of the 750GB Hard Drives into RAID 1 (in other words, mirror the drives to help prevent data loss on a drive failure). IF we didn’t have to do that, this build would have been simple. Open and shut case, literally. Insert all components, install Windows, load drivers, and bam!, you have yourself a PC. However, RAID 1 was difficult. For one, I’d never done it before, though I knew it wasn’t hard, just a setting and configuration in BIOS. However, Windows XP, by default, needs a floppy driver disk for any RAIDs that are newer than about 2001 (XP’s release year). So, after figuring that out, we had a hell of a time making a driver disk (which finally happened after choosing a good floppy disk, a good floppy drive, and the utility from ASUS. Then, installing the driver during install was hell (F6 at the very beginning). There are four to choose from, and the correct one kept blue screening of death the install. The BSOD, in fact, was a memory issue that I was twiddling over forever. Finally, I tried taking all but one stick of RAM out, and it finally worked (which was weird because I memtested the set later and got a 100% pass on the 3 DIMMs). Anyway, long story short, I got Windows in, drivers installed, and Windows updates running. After one update, however, it wouldn’t boot, just a repeat reboot. <Sigh> I called it a night there, because my frustration was through the roof.

Next day, I reinstalled Windows, and did every Windows update one-by-one just to make sure none of them were breaking the build. After concluding all was safe, I figured that perhaps a hardware driver Windows update to the computer was to blame. So, it’s all safe now. The build is updated, RAID 1′ed successfully, and it’s good to go.

Phew, that was a long story, but well worth it in case anyone out there has trouble RAIDing on their board. If you do, just drop a comment.

Happy builds!

So I’ve been building computers again lately. What else is new? Here’s the specs of the most recent system that left my house.

This was a tricky build for one main reason: I ignored the rule of thumb of any build. Put everything together out of the box as-is and test before doing anything else. I made that mistake and it took three weeks to figure out what went wrong.

First off, what you don’t see there are 2 of these Thermaltake Heatsinks:
These things are awesome. Great idea for optional cooling of the Northbridge or Southbridge chipsets. However, on this motherboard, there is also another chip that gets hot. It’s called the NVidia NF 200 and lies between the Northbridge and Southbridge. This little chip got so hot that it kept freezing my computer (ironic, I know).

After getting all of the components swapped out to eliminate the problem it came down to the motherboard. Without checking the motherboard’s ability in its own heatsink, I sent it back to Newegg sight unseen. I got the new one and the same thing happened. I thought that there could be an incompatibility of some kind or memory issue even though the memory worked in another box. So, as dumb luck would have it, I aimed a box fan on the build and found that it stayed stable and lasted a lot longer. Natural reaction: there’s a heat issue somewhere. First thought was the video card. But, that had worked just days before without overheating in nearly the same environment. I decided to check the motherboard for heat just to make sure. And, that’s when I found it. The main problem. That wonderful little NF 200 chip that couldn’t be heatsinked because of its proximity to the video card. So, I threw the original heatsink back on and fired her up, and it worked right off the bat.

It taught me a lesson, though. Always try the defaults of a build before modding or improving the design with fans, heatsinks, or other crap. Next post will hopefully be on the next build, which is for Adcock’s. Kinda strange, I know, but tune in next time to find out how I stumbled upon that job.

So, three weeks home and I haven’t gotten to half of what I planned to accomplish. Work is going well, but for a few hangups and the like. I’m currently in the middle of making the website for selling custom-built computers (tentatively called Final Edge Computing). The requirements list is started and my first mock-up of the design is done. The next step is making sure the data model is sound and can accommodate the functions I want to accomplish on the website. Then, of course, there’s the actual code. So, for a teaser here’s the logo for the site.