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Building the New System(s)

10.26.04

The past few weeks, I've been waiting for my new equipment to come from Newegg.com so that I can build out a faster system for myself: One that won't crash when playing UT2K4 or Call of Duty, and doesn't take forever rendering video. Well, the pieces came and this past weekend I finally got around to putting it all together.

Here's a list of the new parts:
DFI LANParty UT nf3 250GB Motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 3400+ cpu
1G (2x512m) Kingston DDR400 RAM
Antec TruePower 430W Power Supply
2 dual ballbearing 80mm case fans

You can see the basic pictures of the project here. I stopped taking them after the new board was in, because the interest factor gets pretty low at that point.

I started by backing up all of my data to an external USB 2.0 drive I built, and printing an inventory of the PC using the Belarc Advisor. This way, if something disastrous happens, I can try to get the system back up and running.

SIDE NOTE: One thing I failed to mention is that as phat as the new board is, it only comes with a controller for 4 IDE devices. That's not gonna work well with my 5 (2xDVDs, 3 HDs). I sacrificed my DVD reader. I tried to add in an ATA 100 IDE controller card, but it was BSOD'ing. Nixed that idea pretty quickly. It's not a dead issue, but more than I want to deal with right now. Maybe I should just move to SATA drives...yeah, yeah, that's what I should do!!

The new Antec Power supply and controllable case fans definitely make a difference in the amount of white noise in my studio. It's very nice not to have that constant drone of a fan like you're sitting in a data center all day.

After all of the new gear went in, I reimaged the system drive with a custom XP image that my friend Kris built. He slipstreamed Service Pack 2, and a bunch of applications into the build so it was a completely unattended install (except for the original partitioning). It made life SOO much easier.

Now comes the fun part: restoring the old data. The good part is that I store all of My Documents and associated data on a separate drive all together. However, towards the end of the life of my old PC, I was SURE there was a lot of useless crap on the system drive, hence the need for the reinstall of XP.

I had originally backed up all of my C: drive data using Nero Back-It-Up. After reinstalling the application, I went to restore my email. Blue screen of death. Shit. Reboot. Check all my drivers...seems to be working fine...try it again. I get my email restored, but I am not going to chance anything else at this point.

So far, after a few days of using the system, I have only re-installed about half of the applications I had previously. I compared the printouts of Belarc from before and after, and the PC inventory is much smaller. And cleaner. And Faster. That was the ultimate goal of the project.

Now to get to work on the 2nd system...(details coming soon)