Aaah… cold room is cold. Already piling on the cloaks here… Blastoise’s weather widget says it’s 45F!

Yggdrasil Verdict: Based on my back-and-forth with Duxx and other evidence… looks like I gotta chase down a new mobo/CPU. Seeing as those two RAM sticks were in there at the time that the 7600GT blew out, I’d consider those suspect, too. Oh well… may as well use the opportunity to boost to 4gb.

UNFORTUNATELY, unless a mess of coins fall on me via Gourmet Ramen or something else (like the job market for repair techs decides to magically stop sucking hardcore), I will probably have to wait until January. >_>; I’ve already priced out a replacement mobo/CPU pairing that’s under $200 but I would still be cutting it close on my ability to cover the next two month’s worth of pet insurance. I’m even considering dialing back on my weekly pizza summoning as a safeguard. Welp, them’s the pits, I guess. I can always plug Dinah into the HDTV if I must have high-definition computing RIGHT NOW.

Moving on!

Fun With Windows 7: Though I hit a gigantic snag in regards to Yggdrasil, I must remember that I DID transfer my other two machines without them exploding! Yay! Having run on 7 for a few days, I can now give a much more, er, coherent report on it.

If you ran Vista before, visually 7 doesn’t look all that much different. Aurally, 7 even uses the same sounds!

If you’re still a holdout from XP because of speed and (perceived) stability issues… you can come out now. I know, in many ways XP was faster than Vista. Fortunately, 7 seems to return to XP-level of general punchiness.

I would, of course, suggest doing a Clean Install over an Upgrade. While it can be said that Upgrade installs have come a long way since Windows 98, you cannot deny the cleansing aspect of wiping clean (well, sort of– Windows DOES shove AppData/User/Program Files/Windows folders into a Windows.old folder in case you forgot anything during backup) and starting fresh. Installation is thankfully not as scary as, oh, XP where it was in that awful BSOD-looking interface. Pretty much it’s a “Hello, am I doing Upgrade or Custom installation? Where should I put it? Mmmkay, come back in about an hour, I might reboot once or twice. :D” thing.

You will thankfully not need to do much driver-chasing in the process of setting up shop, however, as pretty much whatever 7 can’t install during initial setup it will most likely find during Windows Update. On Blastoise, I only had to manually chase down drivers for my sound card (Creative SB X-Fi Gamer) and the specialized drivers for the tablet (Wacom Intuos3), the latter so I could fix the pen to the primary monitor. That said, be sure to loot the specialized video drivers for your graphics cards as soon as possible for maximum oomph!

I can’t speak in terms of hard numbers or benchmarks, but more of an intangible “feel” of things. Blastoise seems to run his games much more smoothly (WoW and CoH, both at maximum graphical settings but running windowed because of dual monitors). He also boots a little faster than before, which is always a good thing. However, Dinah benefit the most! She began life as an XP laptop, then took a moderate-but-tolerable speed hit when she went Vista. Making the jump to 7, even though I decided to stay at 32-bit, has been nothing but awesome for her– she got her ninja speed back, and how! Most notably, Slingbox no longer lags to crap on her (YAAAAAAY). Though I will no longer be using her for gaming as her ATI chip is rather tiny, she probably could handle low-level stuff without breaking a sweat if I were so inclined. :P

If the whole HomeGroups thing seems really lame, you can easily ignore it and continue tapping into network shares via normal LAN mode. The only real additions that HomeGroup brings to the table are the ability to further lock down your shared media (which could be bothersome if you’re running a mixed LAN since HomeGroup content is for 7-based machines ONLY) and the ability to “push” media around the LAN to make it stream to another 7 unit. In the context of Altima Network, HomeGroups is not really useful to me because we run a mixed LAN here AND Hamachi on top of that (for House Ayarane internal messaging, and also as a special warp pipe for Neo and Bren).

My beef with the login screen (I do NOT care for that kind of blue) aside, I really can’t find anything off-putting about 7 at all. So, just… get it! Don’t be put off much by the system requirements: even if you have an XP box, 7 will run just fine. Hell, you don’t even need to have an optical drive– if you have a USB drive on hand, you can easily make it bootable and install 7 from that (and I hear that’s faster than using the DVDs, shaves off about 10 minutes). $30 for the student discount version, else either grab the OEM editions (especially if you’re installing on a virgin drive) or the Family Upgrade ($150, contains 3 “charges” of Home Premium).

First off, thanks to seraphzero, dvboard and pigeonguided as usual for stepping up in response to the bumps and burps of getting Yggdrasil running. I’ve not cracked him open again since yesterday, though.

Before I go on, I’ll tell the story of the potential problem components.
- The CPU/mobo (Athlon 64 X2 4200+ on a Gigabyte GA-M51GM-S2G) were inherited from brendala‘s machine (Synergy) that I’d built for her in late ’06.
- In late ’08, I boosted Blastoise to 4GB RAM (in the form of 4 1GB Crucial-brand sticks) and fed my old Patriot-brand 2GB sticks to Synergy since both machines have comparable motherboards and can use the same exact RAM specification (in this case, DDR2-667) since they refused to play nice with the newer Crucial sticks.
- Earlier this year, there was a panic button situation in which her machine stopped POSTing, which ended up with me rebuilding her machine (save for the HDD/optical drives). Ultimately the culprit was the 7600GT, which had blown (its caps were split open and some dust was coming out), but Bren DID get a sweet upgrade out of it AND she got 99% of her data back (minus her wallpaper).

Because in the rebuild process I replaced the CPU/Mobo/RAM, I pocketed the orignal gear, assuming that they were still functional. My bad. >_>;

Here’s what Yggdrasil does when I turn him on:

- Lights turn on
- CPU and case fans spin up
- DVD drive blinks and murmurs like any other
- …that’s it.

Nothing comes up on screen. Yggdrasil’s case has no speaker wiring, so that’s not an option here.

Bad RAM is a possibility (and one I am personally leaning towards, since I encountered this issue shortly after building Tsunami in ’07… and if I recall correctly, seraphzero actually called this as the culprit when Tsunami stopped POSTing). I’ve attempted booting with the monitor cable on the 9500GT and the onboard video (which I believe has the chip for a GeForce 6100) to rule out a bad video card, but considering that neither gives me a POST this is inconclusive. Is it possible that when the 7600GT blew, it took the motherboard with it? There’s no visible evidence of any damage on the motherboard, but I recall neophoenixte having something similar happen awhile back…

It has been suggested I take the mobo out and attempt an out-of-body boot… unfortunately, cable reach and a couple of other environmental things make this a not-viable option. I only wish I had access to a proper repair station with as little carpet as possible. Blah. At the very least I’ll be picking up a RAM tester, though it kinda bothers me that those things are still necessary. I know there’s no such thing as perfectly manufactured hardware but you would think that we had refined parts production by now to where we would have extremely low first-use failure rates.

Tl;dr version: Yoshi is a bonehead for using inherited hardware without making sure it was actually functional. Woohoo!

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In other geek news… Remember nearly 10 years ago, when there was this badass TV channel called TechTV? And then it got bought and literally EATEN by G4 and, like, over half the TechTV overlords either jumped ship or in some cases even fled to Canada? Welp, certainly this is old news to a lot of the nerds among us, but I am Across’ resident party late-comer in many things. Enter TWiT.tv and it’s pretty much a happy reunion with most of our old TechTV overlords (along with several new people) in weekly podcast form and they have a live video feed which is every bit as amusing, if not moreso, than the old TV channel. :3

—

Holy crap this room is freezing. Which is… a good thing, really. I hate summer, so I am happy to have the stupidly hot weather go, even if you’ll soon see me bitch about cold rooms.

Better still, it looks like I may actually be able to shower today without putting my shower plumbing in danger. And this will enable me to get out of the house and deposit my VPI checks. Mother has even suggested a Fry’s raid to scope out replacement parts for Iggy, but I would much rather do it via Amazon (because free shipping and no sales tax make Yoshi’s wallet happy) even if I have to wait a little bit. :P I may, however, burn this Visa gift card I’ve been sitting on since last December on an IHOP raid since it’s too small to be of any use to me elsewhere.

…now who saw THIS coming? :P (Stop laughing, Aeth)

At first, case wiring foiled me. Once that was dealt with, though, the real problem surfaced. The case of the missing POST has come back to bite me in the ass yet again! *O Fortuna*

To be fair, Yggdrasil IS using a reused mobo/CPU/RAM (from Synergy 1.0). All the other parts are new or at least confirmed to be working… so it’s got to be something in there. Thing is, I would be cutting it so, SO close if I ordered another mobo/CPU/RAM trio right now, unless I get some Gourmet Ramen commissions or (even less likely) mother decides to reimburse me for her share of several months of pet insurance. It MIGHT be doable if I can get these VPI rebate checks deposited. Otherwise I’ll have to wait until January when I refill my checking account.

…well, i could just try swapping out RAM (because RAM is cheap). But then if it turns out that Yggdrasil still wants a new mobo… Blee-effing-ah. What happened to the days when I could build a box that would POST or not blow up the first time? x_x

Need food. And shower. Shower is being hampered by my ladyparts conspiring against me. Someone did not get the memo to, um, turn down or stop the output when it was supposed to, and I would really much prefer not to clog my shower drain. I’ll leave it at that. >_>;

Yggdrasil is done… well… in that he’s physically ASSEMBLED. I’ve yet to plug him in and find out if he’ll boot or if I just made a bearded Prinny. (I DARE someone to hack the startup prompts to add in Prinnyspeak. “OS not found, dood!” “Abort, retry, fail, dood?” “Press any key to boot from CD/DVD, dood!”) I hope I didn’t botch the case wiring, though I actually don’t do it that often but it still freaks me out. x_x Also ow my thumbs.

I could boot him now but if it turns out I did it right, I’ll be up all night patching him. Which is… no. Already dozing off here, Iggy can wait until tomorrow morning.

Here’s a cute touch for Windows 7: taskbar buttons have their own auras. For instance, Firefox is orange, Semagic is purple, Slingbox is red, etc.
I’m not sure what exactly determines the aura colors. Aeth thinks it’s the dominant coloration in the icon.
That said, whoever designed 7′s login screens needs a boot to the face. People hated on XP’s taskbar looking like Fischer-Price? Dude, 7′s login screens are WAY WORSE. I liked the ones from Vista much better. T____T

First off… HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA YOUTUBE YOU SO FUNNY.
They sent me an email telling me my capture of the Skeith fight in .hack//INFECTION is apparently popular enough to qualify to apply for revenue sharing (read: lol ads). Yeah right, like I would stick ads on THOSE… :P I like coins but I’d rather get them by doing Gourmet Ramen.

(which I am always available for, no matter how big my queue is. Gourmet Ramen commissions ALWAYS trump everything, you go to the front of the line! $20 gets you a bowl of tasty Yoshi arts… but if you really want to chow, there’s always the 3-for-$50 deal! Okay, I’m done shilling now >_>;;;)

Anywho, Windows 7 deployment’s chugging along here. So far, Blastoise and Dinah have made the jump on my end and are more or less done as far as getting their programs and drivers back up. Mother slapped Pro on Onyx earlier… oddly enough, Onyx could not go 64-bit (even though I was pretty sure that everyone I’d built after Blastoise had 64-bit-capable motherboards). Oh well. I had gone downstairs for food and ended up napping on the couch while I was on standby during Onyx’s jump, ahahahaha.

I’ma start unpacking Yggdrasil’s parts during commercials on Countdown. Speaking of which… *activate Slingbox!*