What a project this has been, this is like moving into a new house. LOL
The computer arrived last week however the 8 pin power cable for the mobo was a little too short. This computer has the PSU mounted on the bottom of the case, actually makes a lot of sense because the air is pulled from under the case and expelled right out the back instead of first going through the case. Most of the new cases I was looking at were configured like this. The only complaint is the case and PSU was sold as a bundle and they have to know that this power cord isn't going to be long enough for many configurations. The next issue is there is no IDE connection on the mobo and I never even gave it thought and didn't realize it until it arrived. Even if I could power it up I have no way to install windows.
After spending a day searching for 8 pin extension cable I come to the conclusion there isn't a real computer store left where I live. I was surprised to find Best Buy has just about nothing for internal computer parts and even more surprised to find the small local shops didn't have it either. I stop at the one store and the guy tells me I'll have to buy a new PSU because
they don't make these extensions......
I finally get this thing together and it's the big moment, I hover my finger over the power button and push it......... nothin.
I look inside the case and notice the power button on the mobo is lit up, I push that and it whirs to life BUT the CPU fan isn't spinning. I turned it off really quick. Examining the connection for the fan I notice the fan wires is just barely touching the fan, it came like this from the factory. I get hat out of the way and push button on the mobo again and we're in business! Back to the power button on the case... I double check the wires on the mobo and then notice the negative wire on the switch itself is not connected.
I already had these wires all routed and zip tied in so I have to cut all the zip ties to to get the front panel off the case. After chiseling off a pound of hot glue they used to help secure the switch I find there is four pins on it with the hot wire connected to one of them and they aren't marked. I call up their support to find out which pin I need to connect it to and their suggestion is to
send it back. I figured it out myself with the multimeter.
Next problem is the two drives I bought off of Rob, I decided to run them in RAID1 setting since I have a SSD for the apps and OS, I'm basically going to use them as My Documents. RAID1 is redundant system that mirrors data on two hard drives. If one fails I still have the other one.
The probability of data loss is minimal and I get a slight boost in read speeds since data can be read from both disks at once. Anyhow I set RAID up in the BIOS and try to boot into windows and I get the blue screen of death, haven't seen one of them in years. LOL After a little research I determined because I had initially installed Windows as non raid system there was issue with Windows not loading the RAID drivers and they had registry fix for it on Windows site.
At this point in time should something like this be that hard? I can't possibly be the only one on the planet that has added a RAID array to a system that was already installed without a RAID array.
I'm done yet though because Rob was using these in a *nix system, Windows now boots and recognizes the disks but they have 0 bytes available. This was no easy task either (at least for me because I never did it before), I had to go into the administrator section under Disk Management so I could format the drives to operate under Windows.
Anyhow I'm up and running and enjoying it, still copying files and transferring things like email. I've used windows 7 and Vista before but this is going to take a while to get used too. There is lot of features I like, being able to hover over open windows on the task bar to get a preview is really nice. It's a bit confusing but there is a lot of potential there once I get used to that feature. I really need to get a copy of Battlefield.
Haven't really had a chance lately, last game I bought was Doom3 and my old comp barely ran that. The graphics card will come in handy for Blender and the CPU power will be nice for video work. I'll certainly put these components to use for both work and play.
