I will actually pay someone a penny to take my GTX280 for the cost of shipping. It has a centrifugal blower, is not silent at all, occupies a huge amount of space, blocks several hard drive slots, requires two PCIe aux power connectors, and locks up frequently when in use.

But man, it's fast and smooth when it's working.

 

GTX280 is the better card of the free/almost free options, I'd do that.

 

lol

Then again if he bought a big case and PSU then why not?

 

I'll have to google all this. I have no idea what I'm doing. I nearly melted my brain just doing this simple build.

I really didn't read too much into that case until this morning. Apparently it's pretty baller and won some award or something. I just saw that it was white, made by Corsair, ATX, and ,most importantly, on sale.

Overkill. Now I am starting to understand that my computer will be a Pagani Zonda with a 3cyl Geo Metro engine. All show, no go. lol

 

One thing at a time.

Get your system up and running with the integrated graphics (just use the disc that came with the mobo) and make sure you got everything working nice and steady before adding more addon crap.

I think i said this before. A good rule of thumb is to only physically install what you absolutly need to get the system running. Just because of simple process of elimination if something goes wrong.

 

Parts are here, but I am still shopping for a wireless keyboard/mouse combo...and possibly a monitor.

First impression: This case is ******* HUGE. I had no idea it would be this big. But it looks so, so good.

 

It will make your life easy. Trust me. It's better than being cramped on space.

 

I will put this to shame tomorrow or Wednesday.

 

Getting ready to press the power button on dis negrodamus.

One thing I will need is a new wall-plug bridge ethernet setup. My current one is wireless only and my second ethernet wall-plug kicked the bucket after years and years of use. Any recommendations would be great.

 

In the past, I have always run CAT5 in every place I've lived. Well, that's not true. My first two home networks were 10base-T using RG58 coax.

When I moved into this apartment last year, I decided that since I already had all the bits and pieces lying around, I'd just put a WiFi adapter on my main PC and use that.

After suffering through that setup for about 10 months, I ran CAT5.


Totally unrelated:


A co-worker came ot me late last week saying that his old HP machine at home had stopped booting (WinXP) and asked if I could fix it. I hate working on other people's computers, but I said sure. I've got a build of WinXP-MCE that will run on anything.

So this morning I fire it up, and yeah, it's totally hosed. It won't even start up in safe mode.

First step- boot it with a LiveCD of Ubuntu so I can try and salvage his data. It recognizes the filesystem on the hard drive, and I copy it to a USB hard drive.

At this point, I was about to re-format it, and I though "You know, just in case, I should do a Ghost image." I have no idea why I wanted to Ghost a non-booting machine, but I popped in the Ghost 11 CD and booted into that.

Get to the point where I'm going to image the drive and Ghost throws an error. It suggests that I use Chkdsk on the drive.

Chkdsk? Man, that's a blast from the past. It's right up there with Edlin and FDisk in terms of "stuff I almost forgot existed."

Ok, so I go out to the GhostOS command-line shell, and run chkdsk /F /X. It grinds away for a while, and finishes.

On a whim, I remove the CD and reboot the machine. It boots normally and pops straight into Windows. Everything is fine.


Moral of story: remember your roots. Sometimes there really is a blindingly simple solution.

 

Wall-plug bridge ethernet? Like ethernet over power? How far are you from your router? (I'm sure that you mentioned it earlier... please excuse my laziness)

Edit: also known as ethernet powerline adapters

 

Joe, I'd rather not use my current wireless for the new PC. What is CAT5?

Yes, ethernet over power. The router is on the opposite side of the house, upstairs, through concrete. The setup I have now is an older NetGear bridge. The main unit connects to the router via ethernet cord and plugs into the wall. The other wall plug is in my apartment and gives out a wireless signal. It works well enough for me to watch netflix on my PS3 and goof off on here with my laptop at the same time with no serious issues.

Now, I'd like a new wall bridge with an ethernet port for my comp as well as a wireless signal. Not sure if that could happen. But they do make wall units with multiple ethernet ports, so I could hook the PC and PS3 up off one unit, but then I'd be out of my wireless for my bitchin' mini-book.

 

An abbreviation for "Category 5", which itself is common slang for "A jacketed cable consisting of four twisted-pairs of copper wire, typically terminated with RJ-45 connectors at either end." (In other words, there are lots of different things that meet the Cat5 standard, but we usually use it to mean four-pair cable. There are also standards for Cat5E and Cat6, which are all basically interchangeable given present-day datarates.)

So this:



Going from the back of this:



To the port labeled "Ethernet" on the back of this:




Well, if you're dead-set on using the ethernet-over-power doohickey, here's what you can do:

Buy a wifi router.

Seriously. Pick up any ole Netgear / D-Link / Whatever Wifi router, like the one in the middle picture above.

Run a cable from your bridge to the port on the back of the router labeled "WAN" or "Internet" or similar.

Now, you can plug your PC and PS3 into the other ethernet ports on the router, and also have WiFi for your bitchin' mini book.

 

Overall, it would look something like this:

 

rofl.

 

Netgear sucks. Wouldn't connect to the Kindle Fire, so a firmware upgrade was recommended. Which killed the router. Netgear would offer no support for the "fix" that killed it. Buy Belkin.

 

I like my Buffalo router. It came with DD-WRT so I didn't have to do any work hacking it up.

 

Joe, you think that will work?

Router->wall bridge->wall bridge->router->**** machine

What other options would I have?

 

X sucks. Wouldn't connect to the Y.

Substitute any common brand name for X, and any device using a non-standard implementation of an open-source OS for Y.


If there's another router on the other end of the bridge (rather than a direct connection to a cable modem), plug the bridge into one of the LAN ports on the new router rather than the WAN port, and disable the new router's DHCP server. Thus, DHCP requests from the machines connected to it will simply flow through it, across the bridge, and be serviced by the router on the other end. That way everyone is on the same subnet and on the same side of a common firewall.


Drill holes through walls / floors as needed. (I use a 3/8" drill bit that's about a foot long.) Pull cable through holes. Terminate cable with RJ-45 connectors.

 

I think I may have a router or two around here in my junk bin. I'll give it a shot. Now, I need a set of deez

Drilling would be too complex. The router is very, very far away and upstairs. Remember that houses down here are made of concrete and coral.

However, I am not above running a line outside......and this is cheap