"Pile of Parts"

Today I received my giant pile of PC parts and I set about putting the thing together. It was a lot more of a pain then I thought it would be, at least at first. I have learned enough now it's better to put the memory sticks and processor into the motherboard before putting the motherboard into the case. Which work pretty well actually.

The ATI 5870 card I purchased was large. I mean I had an idea it was going to large but didn't some realize it would THIS large. I mean the box for the card was almost as large as the motherboard box, if that means anything. The card itself it actually much more compact than a motherboard but that's probably because the circuits are folded over on each other or whatever.

I actually started the OS install before I had technically finished putting together the actual case. So just the minimum in hooked up, not the fans or the second hard drive or anything. I had ordered six gigabytes of memory but so far the system is only recognizing four gigs of it. That's six gigs in the form of three 2 gig sticks. So what I'll probably end up doing is ordering two more gigs of memory for a total of eight gigs.

I am actually quite impressed with Newegg for their prompt shipping: I ordered all these parts, including a rather large chassis in a rather large box, on Friday and received them all today, the following Wednesday. I would definitely classify that as very, very impressive.

I also installed the OS on a spare 40 gig hard drive I had laying around apparently. Not sure when I got it or what if any condition it is in but I didn't really feel like over-writing my current PC's C: drive for the new PC first.

I actually had this bright idea of downloading all the drivers for the motherboard and graphics card ahead of time and putting them in my dropbox then all I would have to do is install dropbox on the new computer and oh look all the drivers. Well I was having this annoying issue last night with my internet going up and down at random and apparently the driver files I downloaded were currupted. I'll also mention randomly before the ATI graphics drivers are installed the "Windows experience index showed a 1. One of the most powerful graphics cards on the market and I get a score of 1 from Windows?

Well I've just re-downlaoded the ATI CCC drivers, installed and rebooted. Lets see what score I get now...

Well apparently my overall score is rather low on account of the hard drive. Windows gives the whole system the score of the lowest scoring peice and that component is the 40 gig IDE hard drive I installed on. So the whole system is a 5.0. My current system that goes back four years or so gets a 4.3. The worst part there as well is the hard drive, which gets the 4.3. I guess the Core i7 and this fancy motherboard really speeds up even old IDE drive transfer rates. Or perhaps the RAM has something to do with it. I don't know.

The graphics performance on the other hand is as follows: on my old system "Gaming graphics" gets a score of 6.6 whilst my new system with the fancy ATI gets a 7.8. I assume that a rather big jump. I don't know that I really have a good mark from one place to another as to the significance of jumping from a 6 to a 7.

The card actually came with a couple of games which I actually wasn't expecting. One is on an actual CD the other is a key code to claim the game on steam.

And steam is actually one of only a couple of major things I have to get installed over there, the other being MS Office.

Both of these things will go much smoother once I actually put the secondary drive into the new system.

But here's how I am going to get steam all of its associated what-not over to the new PC: first I'll mention on the old PC that steam is actually on the secondary hard drive, labled P: under something like P:\program files\steam. So on the new PC I will rename that folder so it's something like P:\program files\steam2 at which point I will install a fresh copy of steam to P:\program files\steam, and login with my account without downloading any games or doing anything else. I will then make sure stream is completely closed and in a non-running state and I will rename this fresh steam install folder to stream-fresh or something to that effect and I will renamed the above mentioned steam2 folder to simply steam. Now I can run the normal steam shortcut and besides logging in again everything should be as it was. Although often times I end up re-downloading/installing some of the games anyway, go figure.

Office I'm just going to do the old fashioned way. I should really go through and figure out how to automate that shouldn't I?

I am currently re-downloading the audio driver from Biostar for the I-don't-know-how-time-est-time...maybe they just have a corrupt file on their server or something. This last attempt it actually got through the whole thing, it had like 2 seconds left estimated for download completion and then it just stops and says there was some error for an unknown reason. WTF?!? So now I'm downloading the driver file directly to the new system instead of on a different computer to drop box. Although maybe the dropboxes just hadn't synced yet and that was why I got the error.

Actually all the drivers were found by Windows 7 (64-bit). There actually were NO question marks or explanation points or anything in the device manager. Of course there all generic. At least in the case of the graphics it didn't seem to do much of anything what the the score index of 1 and all.

So yes, this is pretty much dominating my attention at the moment. And I'm sure it will continue to do so until I am satisfactorily using it as my primary machine.

Oh and I should find out if I have a second interview tomorrow. Wish me luck.