The Habitrail

So, besides the bodily harm on Wednesday, assembling the computer went off mostly without a hitch. After a false start with the computer failing to boot because I (once again) forgot to connect the second 8-pin power cable to the motherboard (yes, I’ve done this before), it booted without any problem. Vista installed much faster than I expected as well… I’m guessing the hard drive came pre-formatted because it started copying files to it right away.

By the time I went to bed last night, I had WoW fully patched, with all my addons and configurations copied over, running in all its 60fps glory (42 in Shattrath). I also downloaded FireFox, TeamSpeak and Ventrilo, and I need to remember my TS login which has been saved in my old computer for so long I’ve forgotten it. Next is to download and install Steam and re-install all the various games my old computer couldn’t handle well, like Half Life II.

There was just this one small problem: When I first got Vista running, I was playing WoW on my existing machine, so I tried doing something that would be very passive. I just started downloading the WoW 2.0-2.4 patch. At one point I decided to play a bit while that was going, so I started another program and it BSODed. I lost half of my download, which sucked, but even more so it planted the seed of doubt that everything may not be hunky-dory. This was, however, before I ran Windows Update, so hopefully it was just a matter of it being not fully patched. The BSOD didn’t linger, so I couldn’t read what it said, and Vista’s error reporting tool didn’t provide much other information other than some other (maybe) unrelated issues with the VGA adapter’s driver not being installed.

I looked in the BIOS again to see if there was something I missed, but it’s all newfangled mumbo jumbo to me that’s all set to auto detect and looks like the sort of stuff that I’d cause more harm than anything if I messed with it.

On Monday, I got the case for my new computer in the mail, which sat in the box unopened until yesterday, when I got the parts that go into it in the mail as well. Aside from a Karazhan quick-clear which I sort of had to go on because I’m one of only a few people in my guild who’s still specced for healing, I spent the evening putting the pieces together. Very early on in the process, I gave my finger a good gash on the case, providing the blood sacrifice to the computer assembly gods, and hopefully appeasing them.

I’d also like to take this moment to express how completely different the inside of my new computer looks compared to every other computer I’ve assembled in the past. This is the first time I’ve dealt with SATA, PCI-X, Core Duo sockets, and the really neat silicone-mounted sliding drive bays that the case offered. I just hope I managed to get the CPU heat sink attached properly, I had problems getting all four of the snaps in place, and the manual that came with it was unfortunately not in English… or any other language for that matter. It was just a series of illustrations that was not as useful as I’m sure Intel’s tech writing and legal departments assumed it would be.

I am very glad I bought a new case and didn’t try using an old one.