Monday, Monday | Larry's Blatherings

Monday was the best goddamned day of April, at least if you were not a snow bunny, and so, of course, it was the day I decided to perform a small operation on my desktop.

Early in the day, I disconnected all the lifelines to the peripherals and wheeled the patient into the bedroom where the morning light was streaming in the window. I carefully prepared the operating area by spreading a clean sheet over the bed, and hoisted the patient onto the sheet. After a bit of exploratory surgery, and collection of parts, I discovered the heart of the beast was no longer in the heart of the beast’s box, so I commenced the first scourge of my office to find out what I had done with it. Eventually, I found it right in front on the desk buried in the geologic eras. After moving the beast’s heart into the motherboard, I realized that I had to find if I had cooler fasteners that would fit on the new motherboard, which meant digging through the many boxes in my junk closet. After filling the room with boxes, I found the box I was looking for only to determine that it did not run with Team Red. But, by then I had uncovered one of my ‘bargains’ — a two-fan radiator that actually played with both Team Red and Team Blue. Unfortunately, it would not fit over the fans in the case. I checked out what our local Micro Center computer store had online, disappointed, I ordered an Arctic radiator and fan from Amazon, and went back to work on the patient discounting a few trips over boxes and junk scattered all over my office.

After disconnecting the several hard drives and the other peripherals, after adjusting the motherboard mounting supports a wee bit, I performed the transplant. I went back to the office with the pump and radiator, a few parts and tons of screws, along with the instructions to assemble the pump to fit on the motherboard over the beast’s heart. It looked to me like the screws were too big, but according to the instructions, they would fit. So, I gamely screwed them through the pump housing and into the metal with the fasteners that would attach it to the motherboard. Once I attached it, I figured the two hoses would hold one end of the radiator up, and I dug the garden zip-ties out of the kitchen to hold up the other end. So far, it’s holding, and the patient is not experiencing any fevers. I did attach the two fans it came with in case the large top-mounted case fan was not enough.

As I was disconnecting and connect the various peripherals, I noticed that the hot-mount 2.5″ double drive bay was missing a Molex connector from the power supply. Could this be why it never worked I thought? One of these days, I’ll find out.

Many motherboard manuals are like cookbooks of old, where everything is described as go to page 10 and make the dish there, then come back here to page 15. Some have cheatsheets that cover the needful, but if this one does, I ignored it. Anyway, I started switching out drive cables since the new motherboard has two more than the old motherboard. This required retrieving more cables from the junk closet. I cursed the people who invented SATA connections, since while the SATA cable locks into place, the SATA power cable does not. So, every time you jostle a drive, or plug in the SATA cable, a power cable slides off. In my case, they were doing it wholesale. Remember this is a beautiful day? I’m eating the whole day away running between my junk closet and the bedroom. At dinner time, I sit outside and eat. and water the bulbs and the daylily area, then return to patch up the patient and wheel it back to the peripherals.

Monday was the best goddamned day of April, at least if you were not a snow bunny, and so, of course, it was the day I decided to perform a small operation on my desktop.

Early in the day, I disconnected all the life lines to the peripherals and wheeled the patient into the bedroom where the morning light was streaming in the window. I carefully prepared the operating area by spreading clean sheet over the bed, and hoisted the patient onto the sheet. After a bit of exploratory surgery, and collection of parts, I discovered the heart of the beast was no longer in the heart of the beast’s box, so I commenced the first scourge of my office to find out what I had done with it. Eventually, I found it right in front on the desk buried in the geologic eras. After moving the beast’s heart into the motherboard, I realized that I had to find if I had cooler fasteners that would fit on the new motherboard, which meant digging through the many boxes in my junk closet. After filling the room with boxes, I found the box I was looking for only to determine that it did not run with Team Red. But, by then I had uncovered one of my ‘bargains’ — a two-fan radiator that actually played with both Team Red and Team Blue. Unfortunately, it would not fit over the fans in the case. I checked out what our local Micro Center computer store had online, disappointed, I ordered an Arctic radiator and fan from Amazon, and went back to work on the patient discounting a few trips over boxes and junk scattered all over my office.

Many motherboard manuals are like cookbooks of old, where everything is described as go to page 10 and make the dish there, then come back here to page 15. Some have cheatsheets that cover the needful, but if this one does, I ignored it. Anyway, I started switching out drive cables since the new motherboard has two more than the old motherboard. This required retrieving more cables from the junk closet. I cursed the people who invented SATA connections, since while the SATA cable locks into place, the SATA power cable does not. So, every time you jostle a drive, or plug in the SATA cable, a power cable slides off. In my case, they were doing it wholesale. Remember this is a beautiful day? I’m eating the whole day away running between my junk closet and the bedroom. At dinner time, I sit outside and eat, and water the bulbs and the daylily area, then return to patch up the patient and wheel it back to the peripherals.

Now rumor has it that Windows 10 will adjust and reboot even from a changed motherboard. So when I got the patient plugged in, I hit the start button and the fans began to whirl (at least the ones I’d remembered to plug in), but it wasn’t quite a department store Christmas. After pounding the keys to display the BIOS, I eventually made it to discover that my boot disk was in sixth place, not first, and 1-4 was prime boot territory. So, after setting it to boot, I went to change out the cables, which resulted in the worst of many outcomes — Windows asked for a floppy disk. Who knew it would still do that? After a short period of hairpulling and headdesking, I resorted to the manual and determined that it had a Clear BIOS button, which I then pressed. It fixed the error code that the board had been displaying, and after I set the disk boot order, it started to load Windows. I think I got in, but ended up rebooting and Windows decided it had had enough, and went into repair mode. Since I run tomorrow’s Windows today, I have seen this script before, and after a couple of tries, Windows loads. Of course, it loads without new drivers for the LAN ports or the secondary SATA controller that the DVD players are connected to. (The motherboard comes with a DVD — remember those things — but the usual practice is to surf to the manufacturer’s website and download the latest, hottest drivers. Because it seemed slow on the last computer I built, I decided for some insane reason to copy the DVD over to a USB drive, which I could easily do with my laptop’s three USB hub, and I did. Of course, were I thinking, I could have just put plugged the hub into the patient and ran the goddamned DVD and let it access the internet through the hub’s LAN port, which is what I did after copying the DVD to the USB drive. I stopped the DVD when it was attempting to uninstall the existing Norton to install its own Norton over it, and it was off to the races. Well, OK surf the internetz.

Still to do: replace the cooler, install the right driver for the SATA controller, jigger some of the fans and the cooler pump, and change out some of the SATA cables. I also need to replace the video card with something that does not have a coal boiler, but the boiler helps to keep the three monitors going as well — and a new video card means upgrading the monitors as well. I also have to put more junk away. A Gen4 NVMe drive is also in the future. I can also do a Gen4 video card, but I’m not sure how many are out in the market. They are also the bleeding edge.

Anyway, Monday? I didn’t get out much. The patient survived and has so far stopped rebooting. Of course, I’ve been shutting it down at night. I reinstalled FoldingAtHome. The Cinebench score has gone from the basement to the penthouse, so I can’t blame the computer for not working on pictures and video no more.