No computer = No blog

Well I haven't had a working PC for the last few days so I couldn't do my blog.

Thursday

Went to work, left at 5pm since my new PC parts should have arrived. Got home, did washing up, cleared table, made sandwiches for Tom Morrow, that skillster, and then ate my Jin-the-Pinner.

Opened all the boxes of PC stuff and put them in Jon & Ben's bedroom. Started putting the bits in my new PC, but there were a number of problems. I had bought some thermal paste, but the Core2duo instructions didn't mention anything about thermal paste at all. I had a look on the Jin-the-pinternet on dad’s comp and it seemed like you should use thermal paste. Also the processor came with a fan, which took up nearly all the box. I didn't know it came with a fan so I had bought a separate fan. I thought I should use the separate fan since it should be better than the one that came with the processor.

But when I looked at the instructions for the fan (Arctic Freezer 7 Pro) it said to remove all thermal paste from the processor, and didn't say anything about adding new thermal paste. This seemed a bit weird so I looked this up on the jin-the-pinternet, and found out that actually the Arctic Freezer 7 Pro comes with thermal paste already applied. It would be useful if they mentioned this in the product description / instructions, as this meant I had now wasted money on thermal paste I wouldn't need.

Anyway, the instructions for the Arctic Freezer 7 Pro said to place it so that the fan is facing the same way as the case fans so as to push the air past the processor and out of the case. So I put the Arctic Freezer 7 Pro in facing the same way as the fan at the back of the case, but then the cable from the Freezer 7 Pro was too short to reach the fan plug bit on the motherboard. So after I had installed the Arctic Freezer 7 Pro I had to remove it and install again but facing a different way so I could plug it's fan cable in to the motherboard.

After getting the fan, processor & graphics card successfully installed I noticed that the metal bit that goes over all the ports from the motherboard at the back of the case wasn't in yet. I was just installing things in the same order that the motherboard manual said to, so I flicked forward a few more pages, and nowhere does it say you need to put the metal bit in. So I had to undo the whole motherboard and remove the graphics card and then put them all back so I could fit the metal bit in.

After that I connected up the hard drives to the motherboard and the various chassis wires. I also installed the power supply. Then Ben had to go to bed so I had to take all the stuff I needed out of his room.

Next I tried to put my DVDRW drive in, but it wouldn't fit because the power supply was in the way. So I had to undo that and take it out. Then it wouldn't fit in the drive bay, I thought it was because the drive fascia was too big for the hole, so I tried to take it off but it wouldn't come off. So I unscrewed the DVDRW drive but I still couldn't get the fascia off. Eventually I gave up trying to get the fascia off and just put it back together. With a bit of brute force I then managed to get the drive into the drive bay.

Then it was about 11.30pm and I was really tired so I went to bed.

Food
Breakfast: 2 x Strawberry jam toast sandwiches, cup o’ tea
Lunch: peppered ham sandwich, cheddar cheese with iceberg lettuce sandwich, apple, 2 x clementines
Dinner: Pizza, chips, peas. Pudding was banana, ice cream, strawberry sauce and a bit of flake.


Friday

Went to work, after work we went out for drinks as it was Kerrina’s and Catherine’s birthdays. I said I wouldn’t stay for very long, but when I said I was going to go Catherine said that she was going soon and they’d give me a lift back to the office. Actually it was age-cheese until they went, but they did give me a lift back to the office. I cycled home a bit swervey but didn’t get run over since it was late there were hardly any cars on the country roads.

When I got home I went to bed, but after about an hour I woke up feeling really sick so I puked up down the toilet. Then I went to sleep.

Food
Breakfast: 2 x Strawberry jam toast sandwiches, cup o’ tea
Lunch: peppered ham sandwich, cheddar cheese with iceberg lettuce sandwich, apple, Chocolate Rocky
Dinner: 3 x bottles Magners cider


Saturday

I woke up about 4am in the morning feeling really sick again, then for most of the morning I just stayed in bed feeling really sick and being sick occasionally. One time I was sick I hurt my throat (it still hurts now) and did some red sick so I must have sicked up some of my throat or sumat.

I did get up at 7am and had a shower etc. I went downstairs to have some breakfast as I thought it might make me feel better, but I could only eat half a banana. I went in the back garden and saw a wood pigeon sleeping at the top of a conifer that was waving about in the wind and also there was another wood pigeon behind him sleeping on an aerial so that was quite skill.

Then I felt too ill so I went to bed again and sicked up the banana a bit later. I had been having a drink of water after each time I was sick so eventually I decided not to drink water after I had been sick and then I felt a lot better and got up at about 11.00am after going to sleep for a bit.
Then I watched Ben doing the painting game on Mario Tennis for gamecube.

Then I did a bit more work on the new PC and got it running. In the BIOS it was only detecting 1 hard drive, so I had to go on the jin-the-pinternet on silly farthner’s comp again to see what the settings should be. Apparently to do RAID 0 (which is what I wanted) you just need to plug the drives into the SATA 1 & 2 ports, and don’t use the Jmicron RAID SATA port at all (which I had one drive plugged into before). I also found out that you need to enable something to do with extra PCI memory for the system to realise you have more than 3gb RAM.

After making those changes I got the system up and running and got Vista installed which was quite quick and painless. I watched the episode of gadget show where John installed it on his PC and he said it took ages, so I guess that must’ve been down to his PC being a bit old.

When vista had finished installing I needed to get all the drivers installed. Unfortunately the drivers that come with the motherboard aren’t compatible with Vista 64 so I had to download them on sad-bad-rad-de-pad-dad’s comp and then put them on my memory card to install them on my new PC.

After doing this I could then get the wi-fi enabled on the PC so I could download the drivers direct to the PC. One of the motherboard utilities didn’t work because it said the motherboard BIOS was too old. So I downloaded the latest BIOS and also a program called ASUS Update which lets you update the BIOS from Windows.

So I ran ASUS update and it flashed the BIOS, but then said it couldn’t write the new BIOS. Then it said to try again so I did but it still broke. So then the program exited. So I tried to open ASUS update again but it wouldn’t open and just crashed. So I restarted the PC, but it wouldn’t post. I tried resetting the CMOS as described in the motherboard manual a couple of times, one time leaving the battery out for about an hour but it still wouldn’t POST. Then I did an internet search and found quite a few other people have had the same problem with this motherboard (ASUS P5B Deluxe Wifi-AP). A few people seemed to have fixed it by removing the RAM, so I tried that but it still wouldn’t work. I went on the ASUS website and it said to contact where you purchased the product from for servicing under the warranty. So I’ve had to complete a form on tekheads.co.uk where I bought it from to get it replaced. It said that they will look at the request and then email me details, so that pobasquish won’t be until Monday.

I then removed the power supply from my new PC and put my old PC back together except without the DVDRW drive, so it just has a hole there. I switched it on but the Wifi card wasn’t being detected and also a hard drive and DVD drive weren’t being detected either. I couldn’t be bothered to try and fix them so I just switched it off and went to bed.

Food
Breakfast: Half a banana
Lunch: Half a peppered ham sandwich, prawn cocktail flava criss-ps, satsuma, 2 x nice jaffa cakes
Afternoon treat: Mars Ice Cream Xtra
Dinner: Nice Burger in a nice bun with iceberg lettuce and Tom Ketch, Minestrone fake cup a soup. Pudding was delee strawberry cheese cake but the strawberries were frozen.


Sunday

Woke up about 5am and couldn’t get back to sleep, although lying in bed is still nice. Got up at 6.30am. Ben was just switching on my comp as I came into my room after my shower so I told him to switch it off again since the pinternet and 2 drives weren’t working.

Went downstairs and had breakfast with Ben.

Messed around with my comp and managed to get everything working okay, and started writing this total long-squish blog.

Went to Church, did the chairs afterwards. The preacher was Valerie Colgate Toothpaste and a young guy who had a stutter stutter (Joe).

Spent the rest of the day working on my website to make it look like the design I did in photoshop ages ago.

Food:
Breakfast: Orange Marmalade toast, cup o' tea
After church snack: Custard cream and wierd big biscuit with chocolate cream stuff in the middle, coffee.
Dinner: Curry, rice, mixed veg. Pudding was sumat what I cannae remember.
Tea: Peppered Ham sandwich, Cheddar cheese sandwich, mandarin.