Christmas PC Shenanigans
Well the weather here in Cornwall over Christmas was pretty horrible - no flying during the holiday. Still I was able to build a new machine for my sister (even more demanding than J9) ,check out Laurie’s new box up at the airfield, and wreck my son’s machine.
Here are the specs for Sue’s machine:
- Sempron 3300 CPU
- Motherboard K8M800-M2 AMD 754 Micro ATX
- 1.25 Gb PC133 DDR RAM
- SAPPHIRE - RADEON X1300 PRO 256MB AGP GRAPHICS CARD
- 2*SATA 80GB RAID 0 disks
- AKASA AK-920 EVO120 - CPU cooler fan
I kept the old hard disk and made it the E: drive as before and kept the DVD Rewriter.
The power supply was a little too weak at 180 watts so I replaced that with a new 300W unit from PC World. Then we looked at the case and decided to junk that and replace it with a nice unit with front access to the USB and sound card but that was purely for aesthetics.
I assembled the whole thing with my sister crooning to my kids how ‘clever’ their daddy was. Then it was time to switch on...
... Nothing!
So I have my sister looking over my shoulder as I am trying to figure out what had happened. I took everything off the motherboard, removed the motherboard and checked for damage and reinstalled everything. Still no BIOS.
Sue began to look agitated. Well there are really on two things that can be wrong at this stage, either the motherboard is defective or I have zapped the CPU. I guessed on the motherboard and went into town to replace it. This was Christmas Eve and I had one shot to get this working. I installed everything including the space age CPU cooler and... it worked! I had a bios and memory. It took about 5 minutes to set up the RAID 0 on the SATA drives, then about 45 minutes to install Windows Vista Ultimate and we got a whopping 4.0 performance score with the disks coming in at 5.9!
Clever Daddy indeed.
Sue also has a Lexmark p4350 printer and Virgin broadband using a SpeedTouch modem. Both these devices installed OK despite the fact that Lexmark have not published a Vista specific driver. In fact the only thing missing from the Lexmark install is the All-In-One-Center suite, and with the fax and scanning wizard there is really not much need for it anyway.
I put on Office 2007 Ultimate and Sue is one happy camper.
Total performance scores:
· processor 4.0
· Memory 4.0
· desktop performance 4.8
· Gaming graphics 4.2
· primary hard disk 5,9
Phew! If you knew my sister you would know how nerve wracking it was.
