The joy of wireless (to avoid reading a lot of hardware geekery, Look Away Now)

by Diane

It’s been time to build Peter a new desktop computer for a while now. He’s been complaining that his old video card installed in his computer, “George”, wasn’t running games like “IL2 Sturmovik” properly, and the displays were jerky and slow. It wasn’t just the card, of course, but his whole system, which was only a middle-grade Pentium III with not enough memory.

Well, that’s gotten better now. The parts for the new machine started arriving shortly after the New Year, and finally, this week, there was time to assemble them.

The 19″ Iiyama monitor and the CoolerMaster case remain, of course. But I yanked the case’s guts out and inserted the following:

Asus P4G8X Deluxe motherboard (with onboard LAN and audio, though he’s not using the audio)
Intel Pentium 4 processor, 3.02GHz
1 meg of Corsair XMS Extreme DDR memory (512 x 2)
Radeon 9800 Pro AGP8x video board
Maxtor 128G hard drive
The old Fujitsu 40(-ish)G hard drive
Creative Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro (internal) sound card and (external) I/O hub

…There were the usual hiccups in the installation, but (by and large) not from the usual places. The power management settings in the new Award BIOS are fairly complex, and the motherboard seems to be having some weird issue with the Enermax power source: though Windows shuts down correctly, the power source fan won’t turn off unless you flip off the master PSU power switch at the back: and then the machine (for a while) wouldn’t boot again until you cleared the CMOS via the jumpers on the motherboard, and restarted.

(And for you experts out there: no, the problem isn’t the “keep cooling the board down for five minutes after shutdown” feature of the new Enermax PSUs; no, all the cables and pin-ins to the case switches are correctly connected; no, I flashed the BIOS and it’s current; no, it’s not about twenty other things I’ve already checked and rechecked. It’s just a Weird Thing for which we’ve found a workaround.)

…Anyway, we did a clean install of Windows XP Pro to the new HD, and then did another clean install (when adding the Fujitsu drive) while attempting to resolve the motherboard’s startup issues. The resolution didn’t work, the new install didn’t want to access with the Fujitsu drive even though both Windows and the BIOS could see it perfectly well, and then, on top of everything else, Windows claimed that it had been installed “too many times” and wanted to talk to a service rep and be re-verified. (mutter…)

That’s still to do. Between then (two days ago) and now, we found the power-switch workaround (flip the “master power” switch and then quickly hit the front ATX power switch, and the machine boots properly). It’ll do for the moment. And for some reason, the machine suddenly started seeing the Fujitsu HD, so Peter could start migrating his old files to the newer, bigger drive.

Yesterday, though, came the installation of the features I’d really been looking forward to. Yesterday we plugged in the Linksys 802.11b/g router and hooked it up to the satellite broadband.

Wheeeeee!

Streaming audio from everywhere. Streaming TV from various European sources and a few US ones (it’s surprising how little live TV streams to the Net from the US. Copyright issues, I’d guess…) Websurfing in bed on the laptop, Ryoh-Ohki. Big CD-quality Net radio downstairs on my own desktop, Calanda. Boy, I love this…

Tomorrow or the next day comes sorting out the home filesharing network. Then, on the hardware front at least, I can say, “My work here is done.” George II is built. (There will be no “George III.” It’s my experience that computers’ names affect their behavior, and naming a machine after George the Third would be tempting Fate.)

Meanwhile, Peter stayed up all night playing Sturmovik. And who could blame him?

He gets to stop that for today, though, because today’s our 17th wedding anniversary. 🙂

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