Sorry about the angry rant the other day, but let me start here by saying that things got much better as the weekend went along. Saturday was a really good day for the mail people, when things got delivered exactly when they were supposed to. Even the CPU coolers being sent from China!
So, I was envisioning a relaxing weekend with the exception of the frantic string-trimming to beat the week-long oncoming rainstorms that is. I even took a nap on Saturday and planned on getting my computer building groove on come Sunday afternoon. That was the last thing that went right!
It started off with a little "house-cleaning" done (so to speak). I have a co-worker whose little girl decided that their PS3 require coinage like an arcade machine. The penny was enough to cause the machine to constantly shut down as soon as it was powered up! Once I got a Torx security bit for it and got the machine apart, the coin extraction wasn't much of an issue. After that, it never would come up at all. It gave the constant "blinking red" light of a "general fault-state". So, it's going to go home tomorrow.... not working.
Then I moved on to the first of my 3 HTPCs that have been waiting to be updated. I had all the parts on hand and just needed to put the board into it's Silverstone SG-05 temporary home. How much trouble could this be? I didn't even need to plus in the PSU since it takes outboard DC power. Yeah....... that didn't go well at all since the jack was of a different type than any adapter I happen to own. So, one fully constructed computer with I can't power up!
So, I decided to move on to the main HTPC from my A/V rack. Now that the HSF had arrived from China, I was set to go, right!?! I pulled the machine, got the old motherboard and boot drive out and proceeded to do the install. My most difficult issue was trying to decide which SSD to use as the new boot drive. After settling on an 120Gb Intel instead of the 160Gb (it's got a 500Gb storage drive), I got it connected up. .....Black Screen...... That usually means bad or incompatible ram, As I pulled the 1st stick out, I realized that I hadn't connected the 12v EPS power.... OK, that explains it. This was followed by 1 minute of angry frustration and 15 minutes of digging through my boxes of stuff. Yes, this board takes the new 8-pin EPS power vs. the standard since P4 days, 4-pin! The quiet little SFX PSU in that case only has the 4! And; I found out that you can't just use a second 4-pin via adapter since I have one of those. So, that machine is 95% done waiting for the new adapter to show up from somewhere around Austin.
I was about ready to throw something through the window when my wife called me for dinner. While I was eating my breakfast burrito (we eat breakfast for dinner on Sundays), I calmed myself down thinking about doing the third machine. I was 100% sure that one would get completed since I had put it on a testbench and set it up. As I was walking up the stairs to get the machine out of our bedroom, my wife calls me over and says that she wants to watch episodes of Elementary that we missed last week! So, no computers (or PS3) got finished after an entire afternoon of working on stuff! Some days you win, other days you get your behind handed to you......
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