lol, fine. The singular gfx card edge, then.

*mumbles something about SLI*

hehe....you bastards. That's cool. I plan on having a laptop by Christmas that'll own you all! Well, except for Peltz. :p

Oh, and on a side note, apparently the modem stopped working in a box I built for Shiny's step dad. I didn't have the time nor the desire to look at it, so rather than take it somewhere to get fixed, they bought a new computer from Best Buy or some shit. And gave us the 'broken' one. Seeing as we don't use dialup for anything, we just inherited another computer. Which means we have 4 computers in the house (and a fifth, crappy 450mhz machine on loan to someone else). I'm feeling wired.

No, don't want to sell it just yet. This backup pc is pretty darn handy.

That brings me to my rant.


So, I picked up my pc yesterday afternoon. Got home, installed RAM bars, gfx card and a DVD drive. (soon to be replaced by a case-matching black DVD/RW)

The pc on itself looks awesome. The Antec is top-notch both in design and specs, with a 500w PSU, a massive 120mm fan at the back and so forth. No complaints there. Inside the case looks superb too, the Zalman CPU cooler is just insane. Getting the ram under there was quite a task, but just check the attached pc and you'll see what I mean.

So, that's all good stuff. Anyway, plug it, boot from windows disk, format, install windows. Everything fine. Then the madness starts...no matter what I do, something seems to get fucked up. First I get in trouble because of some spyware bundle -which is insane as I visited only three sites among which windows update- but I venture on. So, installed chipset drivers, basic gfx drivers, sound drivers and modem. Windows update, get the super-imperative updates. All the while during windows sometimes just locks up, taskbar freezing and everything = reboot. Anyhoo, after a lot of freezing up I get to SP 1 download, install it. Still have issues with something sucking CPU power and can't find it manually or trend micro online virus scan can't, so I decided to install the Norton AV delivered with the mobo....bad idea. After updating and a reboot, Norton kills windows: at reboot I get an error message related to it and the icons refuse to load. Typically norton, should have know better I guess.

Instead of trying to fix it I go for a full format, nothing on the HD of worth anyway. So, start over again...still some minor issues, but i'm getting there...until! A second series of windows update makes windows boot reaaaally slow. With all this shit happening again ('normal' software acting insane) I decided to flash the BIOS with the asustool, makes it easy as hell. So that goes from 1005 to 1008. I think and hope that everything's fine, and it looked like that for a while. So I go to download SP2, spend over an hour downloading the 113mb SLOW ASS installer. Everything goes fine, until....during the cleanup session of the SP2 installer the whole system freezes, just like that, no warning. Mouse, taskbar, screen. WTF? I reboot, and guess what: windows 'loads' the welcome screen, then after a long while the blue background XP screen but no icons or anything. Screwed!! Last known config don't help. Sigh.

I've already calmed down a bit, but I'm fucking pissed off. I have no freaking clue what's going wrong. The problems are seemingly software related which shouldn't be a surprise on a new system, but with latest drivers of the chipset, sound, directx, windows updates and even a recently flashed BIOS I have NO FUCKING CLUE. (I didn't have the latest gfx card drivers but they required SP2, so...we know what happened there. I tried installing them anyway, but had to rolle them back in safe mode cos windows wouldn't boot anymore. So they really need SP2) So, any input is welcome. I'll work on finding a new windows XP cd in the meantime...Unlikely that'll make a difference, but hey. For now I unplugged the new pc and plugged this old thing back in.

Sorry for the rant, but I spared you a lot of other stuff. Like modem/network drivers conflicting at first, stopping me from getting online. Blech. It's so horribly bitter to have a massive system for once and I can't get it to work over fucking windows issues. Signing off.

lol, that's a monster cooler.

May I humbly suggest, since you have a burner, that you just download all these drivers/updates/service packs and burn them to cd so you don't have to keep redownloading them? Get the network install versions...they're bigger, but you don't have to connect to the internet to use them.

Once that's done, wipe the HD using the XP installer, install XP, and load into it. Then install SP2. No updates or anything else prior to SP2. If everything's still happy at that point, then start loading your other shit. Motherboard drivers first, then gfx card drivers, then other drivers for any other hardware you have. Then directx9.0c or whatever it is now.

Then tweak your system. Disable system restore (if you so desire), disable stupid services, tweak the UI to your liking, etc.

Once all that's good to go, I highly recommend you defrag that whore, then start installing your applications. After installing all your apps, defrag again.

I think I'm gonna make a thread about my encounter with malicious websites now.

well, it seemed to have done the trick! But I'll only trust it when I'm running without incidents for a few days...so:

I formatted, installed windows again and installed SP2 from the cd. Then the modem, then other critical updates. Then latest gfx drivers, and chipset drivers...but it went wrong there.

See, the BIOS I flashed up to 1008 in the previus attempt prolly has a problem...on the Asus site it said 'make sure to install version 6.55 of the chipset drivers before installing this BIOS". Which I did back then. But now with the clean formate and windows reinstall I obviously didn't have a chance to install them before the BIOS. So when I tried rebooting after installing them, windows hung on the boot screen. Last known config put me back in the game tho.

Other than that all things are going flawless...HL2 runs brilliantly, just isntalled GTA: SA, let's see how that goes. Think I need the chipset drivers? It's ethernet and IDE and whatnot, and I don't use a network of any kind. So, I don't think it can hurt me much...didn't notice any stability yet for one.


On another note: I was feeling really crap for a little while today...dunno what that was. Sweating, legs shaky, little bit light in the head, shaking hands. Gonna see the doc tomorrow I reckon...haven't been doign good of later in general, but nothing this bad. So I wanna get it checked up, and hope it's nothing but a little bit stress/tiredness. peace!

you probably caught a computer virus.

as for the chipset thing...err...chipset drivers are usually extremely important for performance. But whatever works for you, I guess. Also, it doesn't make much sense that you have to install a BIOS update after installing Windows drivers. Bleh...anyway, I don't feel like thinking, so at this point, whatever works for you.