Jumpin' Jack Flash - the computer

I was born in a crossfire hurricane. And I howled at my ma in the driving rain. But it's all right now, in fact it's a gas. But it's all right, I'm Jumpin' Jack Flash, it's a gas, gas, gas.

And so since when did I leave this blog to stagnate? Sunday morning it seems. Lemme recall.

Oh. I was doing my homework. Case write-up 2, and I was surprisingly breezing through it.

And so, later, I went with my brother to Sim Lim to get the parts for the new computer. He wants to build up a gaming-oriented system, and I was tasked as the chief engineer of the project.

How to build up a good computer system?

Firstly, make sure you have got sufficient experience. If you can't tell the difference between a stick of RAM and a graphics card, naw, get someone else do it. Know the parts that goes into a computer really well. Know the trends (if you haven't heard of Core2Duo chips, naw, get someone else do it too).

Read up. Alot. Benchmarks, reviews, et cetra. Download the price-lists and do your sums. Weigh the cost versus the capabilities of the product. Surely you won't pay almost double just for a 10% increase in speed!

Some 'premium' products offer only a slight improvement, but don't cost that much more, and you should go for those too. For example, 2GB of 800MHz memory is only a teensy bit more expensive than 667MHz but at same clock latencies, the performance improvement is small but statistically significant.

And go for the latest tech only if it's worthwhile. I decided to go for the shiny new Intel P35 chipset as there's a performance increase in benchmarks, along with favourable subjective reviews.

As for other cases where things are less clear, I go by subjective (and biased) evidence. Reviews, word-of-mouth, previous pleasant/unpleasant experiences with any particular brand. Well, I gotta admit that I'm just a sample size of 1 and I'm totally biased, but what else can I really work with? Googling for every single review and benchmark is just infeasible.

And so it ended up as:

Mobo: Asus P5K (new gen P35 chipset, oooh lovely copper heatpipes)

CPU: Intel Core2duo E6600 (highest end reasonably priced cpu)

RAM: 2X1GB Twinmos 800MHz (that's like, the only brand that sells non-exotic 800MHz RAM, i.e. without fancy heatsinks and a fancier price premium)

HDD: Western Digital 500GB (my brother uses alot of hard disk space, so it's better to go the whole 9 yards. Almost settled on Seagate, but there were negative anecdotes on local forums on it)

Graphics: Leadtek 8800GTS 320MB (quite high end, best value for money)

DVD writer: LG H44N (a plain jane model. Since Sonys and Samsungs have disappointed me, and the LG in my notebook, and another LG H44N in the older PC is working perfectly, it's an easy choice)

Casing: Coolermaster CM5 (reputable, and SPECIAL OFFER WHOOHOO)

Power Supply:Verudium 480W (they all have similar features so, this is purely a decision based on anecdotes on tech forums)

Monitor: Samsung 19 inch Widescreen 931BW (looks great in real life, and it has a speedy response time for gaming)

Mouse: Microsoft Habu (one of the few gaming mice, and this one had more accessible buttons, which clinched the deal)

Evidence-based, economical and logical decisions! Yay!



Lugged it all home, and I was given the menial task of joining all these parts into one mean machine. The last time I had let the shop do it, I still had to open it up to connect the connectors that the shop failed to connect, in addition to connecting the old hard disk for data transfer. So. might as well do it myself.

Putting everything together was a major bitch. It involves an insurmountable number of steps, from electrostatic discharge precautions. unpacking, being handy with screwdrivers, fumbling with casings with poor documentation, having to install super-delicate and small parts that cost a few hundred bucks each. Then clearing the mess of boxes and finding space on the table.



I knew how to do everything. Never got really stuck, but it was just depressing, having so much to do at once. It's strange. I ought to be excited, fixing up a brand new computer, doing an activity that used to fascinate me. Making plans and strategies to get it up and running quick.

But why do I feel so sad and frustrated while doing all these? It's not like things aren't working - in fact, everything went so smoothly. I guess... I'm just depressed.



Booted, set everything in the BIOS. Installed Windows. And software issues galore. Somehow, the video card's so new and all, the drivers aren't too well-written. And it gave me a big headache troubleshooting just why the display was so blurry. Swapping cables from analog to digital to analog to see if it's a software or hardware or etc issue. And after a Google, I found out that it's a known issue, and there's a fix.

Not to mention, some issues with playing videos, so I had to fiddle with the video playback settings before the image is no longer blocky. NVidia doesn't program their hardware video accelerator thingie well.



Staring at the screen, getting the things to work one by one, downloading drivers, et cetra. Menial. Depressing. Some things just don;t work the way I think they do, and it's totally frustrating figuring out one thing after another.

And when I couldn't find my thumbdrive (needed to update the BIOS of the motherboard) I well near broke down. This shouldn't be happening. I wasn't very emotionally stable. Quickly gathered my wits and used the USB microSD reader from my DS flashcart, along with the microSD card from my DS instead.



Exhausting. And I called it a night, for the next day is another dreary day in school.