Hate it. Hate, hate, hate. Bleah. Sucks almost as much as software does.
Because of the sobig thing, and the inevitable next wave, which I don't think my server will survive, I'm building a new server. Spiffy keen, with as much power as I can get for ~$300. (Which turns out to be a surprising amount) On Ask's indirect recommendation, I ordered the bits from NewEgg.com. So far, so good.
The stuff came in three cartons, over two days. FedEx, of course, felt that leaving the boxes in my apartment's stairwell was Just Fine, annoyingly enough, but that's a separate problem. I go to put the thing together, along with the cheapest video card I could dig up locally (I knew I'd forgotten something) and...
Nothing. Power supply fan doesn't kick on, CPU fan doesn't kick on, case fan doesn't kick on, and nothing on the board shows any signs of life. A quick minute with the multimeter shows there's power coming out of the power supply, so I'm presuming either the motherboard or the CPU is fried and dead. (Given that the CPU fan doesn't kick on, I'm assuming motherboard, but I might be wrong, and I'm not willing to leave it all energized long enough to poke around contacts with the multimeter--if the board is dead, but it fries the CPU in Very Bad Ways, it's not fit for replacement)
Feh. Now I get to test NewEgg's RMA policy, after one more go at it tonight. (Maybe I'll get lucky)
I do like NewEgg well enough to order the parts for the TPF Parrot/Perl5 WinXP box. I'll be really peeved if I get the windows box up and running before the server. (And doubly peeved if sobig.g hits first)
Posted by Dan at September 4, 2003 08:06 AM | TrackBack (0)Personally I would recommend googlegear.com, I
alternate between them and newegg because while
newegg sometimes has lower prices, you can often
arrange your order at googlegear so you pay
$0 to pittance on shipping (ups 2nd day is free
or $.50 on many items).
It turns out that, while I would have screwed up my motherboard and CPU really badly given the chance, my extreme hardware incompetence kicked in so early I didn't get the chance--I never managed to get power to anyplace on the MB to fry things, which was lucky.
I ended up doing the sensible thing and mentioning the problem to the folks at the office, and one of the actual competent PC guys took a thump at it and it seems to be going, which is nice.
I might take a look at googlegear, but if I'm lucky I won't have to do any of this again for ages...
Posted by: Dan at September 4, 2003 04:20 PM