egathentale
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Status Update
🕑 Added 2023-09-12 12:39:12 +0000 UTCHello, dear readers.
Long story short, I ran into some technical difficulties. I decided to upgrade my PC a little (namely the CPU and the memory), and it caused me quite some headache. Just to give you the basic beats:
-Install new CPU.
-System doesn't start.
-Turns out, despite what the shop said when I originally bought this machine two years ago, they didn't update the mobo's BIOS, so it wasn't compatible with the new CPU.
-Take out the new CPU and put the old one back in, so that I can download the necessary files for the BIOS flashing
-Uh-oh. I ran out of thermal paste.
-Without thermal paste, I couldn't install the cooler, so I gave up and slept on the whole ordeal
-Today, I went into town and bought some paste
-Put the old CPU back in, system booted
-Download the files from the mobo manufacturer's site to a flash drive, do the BIOS update
-Everything boots fine
-Replace CPUs AGAIN
-UEFI settings have to be reset, but fine, it works
-Everything boots! YAY!
-Put in new memory sticks.
-System doesn't boot again.
-Switch sticks around.
-System still doesn't boot.
-Put back the old ones.
-System STILL doesn't boot.
-Take the whole thing apart.
-Realize that there's a single strand of hair in the socket.
-Use a pair of tiny little tweezers to carefully pull it out, and then clean the contacts with alcohol and half a toothpick.
-Put everything back.
-Now everything works, but I'm tired and annoyed.
So yeah, this ended up way more complicated than expected, and I'm not in the right mind-space to write. I'll sleep on this, and will give you the next chapter part tomorrow. Till then, please be patient with me, and thank you for listening (/reading) to my grumbles.
Comments
Terry Stevens
I eventually, after eight years, decided to get a complete new system, bought all the parts myself. So a real custom setup. Cost like £4k. So when i was putting it together, i was so tense, because I had no one to turn to for advice. 64gb ram, 12 core cpu, a noctua fan, 4tb of m.2, 4tb of solid state memory. After two days of making everything was solid and correct, I start up my computer. Buggering thing doesn’t do a thing. No lights, nothing. So I check everything is plugged in, nothing is loose. Cant find a sodding thing wrong. Three hours later, I finally figured out that the graphics card cable was plugged into the wrong position on the battery. Swapped it over, and voila. Sometimes, if it is something stupid , it is more emtionally draining, rather than something that isn’t your fault.
Egathentale
Thanks for the empathy. Also, I had a bonus round: I was so annoyed by the end of it that I managed to clip the cooling fans onto the cooler tower backwards, and then I was mystified by why my new CPU was running at 80 degrees Celsius. Building your own PC gives you so much freedom and considerably better cost/performance ratio than any pre-built or proprietary corporate design, but it's such a finicky business...
Danielle Warvel
Ouch, I know that pain. I switched back from mac to pc for my laptops because I wanted to do some pc gaming, but I hadn’t used one for so long I felt like an idiot trying to use it, and just a few months after getting it, they did an update that completely locked me out of it due to some kind of catch 22 glitch with the new encryption security measures that were installed. Spent like 5 hours over the course of two days and half a night trying to figure out who to call, what the problem was, how to fix it, and then testing like twenty different methods to apply the fix until one stuck. Basically had to return it to factory settings. Thank god basically everything was on cloud storage. The only reason I didn’t blow a gasket was because the customer service was good and really patient and polite. Trying to write while in that kind of headspace? Yeah, no. So yeah, you have my full sympathies and all the time you need to recover with no judgment here.
