Computer Set Up

Everything but the monitors arrived last Friday, and I immediately commandeered the dining room table for the build. It took me all evening, as I’m very meticulous, but I finished it just in time to wait some more for the monitors to arrive. Sitting around for the rest of the night, I lamented to my brother in law that I couldn’t test it. Silly me, he said, fire it up and listen for the POST beeps. I took it one step further, realizing I could hook it up to my TV, and did just that.

At first… no POST beeps… no video… nothing. But, the internal LEDs were showing 100% processor usage. Took me about a half hour until I realized I had the TV on the wrong channel (it has 4 input channels). Trying again… oh joy, errors! What the hell, man! I had to sit there and completely re-read the motherboard manual until I realized I didn’t hook up the 12v processor plug. Silly me.

So we’re in what, the 26th inning now? I fiddle around with the BIOS for an hour or two on my 32″ TV before finally throwing in an old Kubuntu disc. Tried running it as a live CD… crashes and burns. Try installing it, same effect. Try a different version disc and hey, guess what? Still the same. As with different distributions, and even booting from a USB dongle. Endless research and possible kernel workarounds tell me it’s a common problem, and the only real fix is a newer version, but the CD burner in my laptop doesn’t work, so that doesn’t help.

Thirty-third inning and I decide to try Windows XP, thinking that if I can get that running, I can download and burn a newer version of Kubuntu and I’ll be set. Hack my product key out of the registry, yadda yadda yadda, even Windows XP won’t install! Just a lovely blue screen bathing the room in hate. Another couple of hours of research and find the cause to be such an awesomely new motherboard, and the solution to be to burn a new XP CD with SP2 or SP3 slipstreamed on to it. Great, sounds easy enough, except I still don’t have a working CD burner.

Get back to my bro-in-law the next day after the monitors arrive, and he offers up a copy of Windows 7. Great, but my truck might not make it over the mountain and back, and I’d have even bigger problems on my hands. End result? I had to go out to Staples (after failing to find it at Wal-Mart) and bust the budget by $200 for a copy.

But holy crap, it finally works. Also needed a new mouse as my notebook one (which had a stuck scroll wheel and missing pieces anyway) didn’t reach worth a dip. Solution there in the interim (as I only bought the mouse last night) was to use the laptop cooling pad as a USB hub to make it barely reach. Just fixed an intermittent crashing problem in Windows (I hope), and burned a Karmic Koala disc to try later.

For curious minds, here’s the details:

• GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P ATX motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0GHz processor
• EVGA GeForce 9400GT graphics card
• Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB 7200RPM SATA II hard drive
• Corsair XMS2 2×2GB DDR2 memory
• Samsung/Toshiba DVD-W 22x w/ Lightscribe
• Acer V223-WBD 22″ widescreen monitors

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