Yesterday was "Skunkworks" day. If you aren't up on aerospace lore, it's the highly secret Lockheed design and construction facility outside of LA. This place goes back to Howard Hughes and his work for the government during WWII..... and also where the SR71 "Blackbird" was birthed.
Beginning last Thursday (good timing huh?), the last of the stuff for the Blackbird rebuild started coming in; the Intel i5 3450S processor and the Kingwin FPX-004 Front Panel, cardreaderUSB3.0portsfancontrollercasetemperaturereadoutmicheadphone-thing. Oh yeah, the X300 screen, but that's a different story. Confronting me was; Thursday night, one child going to a "real" basketball game with her team, and the other child's Open House/Music Program. Then Friday night in the lovely village of Crandall with Soccer and overlapping Valentines dinner-date with my very patient wife who happens to teach there, which caused me to get home at 10:30, so no build. Saturday, I had kids' basketball, pretty much all day, cleaning the garage, spraying the yard for weeds and pulling the stack of old computer parts I promised to another ThinkPad Forum member....so yeah, wiped out. Then Sunday, of course there was church then grading two stacks of essays from my Advance Placement World History class. However in between the two sets of papers, I took a break by pulling and starting to disassemble Blackbird. Then finish grading the second set of papers. However I got nothing else done since it was now time for my son and I to go see "Jack Ryan Shadow Recruit", which I highly recommend for all you aging Tom Clancy readers out there.
After dinner at Wendy's (son's choice), it was time for........ no, not The Little Mermaid!?! Nope, that's there, because that's where mom and daughter had gone, about the time we got home! Slick planning huh? I took the boy to the late afternoon movie so that when we got home, the mother-daughter event was just starting in downtown Dallas! Two plus hours of solitude, otherwise known as
SKUNKWORKS TIME!!!
Now, finally, I got the chance to put the "new" parts back into the old case. I moved all the drives to their new location since I was putting the new "avionics" (Kingwin Superpanel) into the top bay of the case. I had already swapped out the new (Sandisk Extreme) 240Gb SSD in the drive cage, so that went in as well. The Z77 board was bigger than the old one so I installed new stand-offs. Then it was
board-time; the CPU got cleaned and went in, then I tackled the big CoolerMaster 212 EVO heatsink/cooler and let me tell ya, it's a huge chunk of copper and alluminum! The Corsair RAM went in next, then the board was installed. It was now time to connect
ALL the many cables, followed by the cards. After that, comes the part that I hate. Crawling under the desk to connect all the various peripherals, in positions that make it hard to see and uncomfortable to be in.
I was rewarded by.....this.....a black screen, and the computer going through repeated loops of trying to P.O.S.T. I tried all kinds of stuff. Usually, a "black screen" is a sign of bad or loose memory. Not this time. Then I remembered that this board had a 2 digital diagnostic panel on the MB, which emphatically said "15". The manual said that 15, was Pre-memory Northbridge Startup. WHAT THE!!!! Off to Google, which said all kinds of things that didn't make sense until the end of the 3rd article I looked at which talked about a backside short on the motherboard. A-Ha, I said! I had noticed that it looked like the backplate of the 212
might have been touching the MB tray. One disassembly/couple of layers of electrical tape/reassembly later, the machine booted normally.
And I got to see that wonder of modern computing....the UEFI! From here the load proceeded as normal, except much, much faster. I felt like some sort of Geek-Spy-Superhero who had just saved the world/western civilization by hacking into a secured computer system. OK, that was the Jack Ryan character from the movie, but still......
We are now in "test flight" time. Which basically means loading basic software, updates, and more updates. Then I started getting some errors on a few utilities I use. After more Googling, I learned that if you use a machine with UEFI, and GPT instead of MBR, you'll run into the problem I did (whatever the &^%^$#% all that stuff means). Anyway, the fix, is to repair or reload
after having
preformatted the drive before the Windows load occurs! Of course that means, 2 hours of work wiped out! In the mean time, the wife and child came home which as good timing since was a little frustrated and needed a break!
11 O'Clock, back to work and magically everything loads as it should. A couple of M$ updates rounds later, it's off to bed at 2:55 AM. Yeah, the sides are off. The cables are all over the place. My office looks like craziness happened there and I haven't gotten monitor 2 working right, but hey; that's why we crash-dummies get paid the big bucks, right? If there's a cautionary tale in all this; it's to
never so a build without another fully working computer beside you which is hooked up to the Internet! In the end; the cat got to play in the boxes, and that machine? It's seriously faaaaast!
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