So it finally happened; my computer is dead. Actually, it’s more like I finally carried out the mercy kill. My computer started life as a high end gaming system I built back in ’02. Since then it has been reduced to a heap of barely functioning part, strung together in an attempt to keep it functioning long enough for my wife to finish college. The RAM was reduced from 1GB to 512MB when I determined that a faulty stick was causing Warcraft 3 to crash. The DVD burner died and was replaced with an old 8x CD drive, ripped from a machine on it’s way to the recycler. The machine has seen a string of hand-me-down video card pass though it, like a parade of bad step-fathers. The final nail came a few months back when I installed Dofus on it. The next day, I fired up the computer and found that I had no boot sector. Apparently my computer hates the French.
Normally this isn’t a dire situation, I just wipe and reload. But my wife has a bunch of pictures on the drive that weren’t backed up. Since then, I’ve tried the standard fixboot stuff. I’ve manually replaced the NTLDR file. I’ve tried performing several repair installs of XP. Nothing has worked.
Needing to burn some vacation, I decided to take yesterday and today off from work. I was determined to retrieve the pictures off the computer. I bought an 8GB flash drive. I was going to boot into the recovery console and copy all the files to the flash drive. I quickly found that while in the recovery console, I only have permission to copy files in the root of C and the Windows directory. Time for plan B.
I burned Parted Magic and System Rescue Live CDs from my Linux HTPC. I booted my Windows box on Parted Magic first. Parted Magic stalled while trying to eject the CD after it loaded the OS into memory. I tried running it again with the boot option that keeps the CD in the drive; reading from it instead of RAM. This seemed to work. The system booted, I could launch the XFCE desktop and I was able to mount my Windows partition. I located the pictures and tried copying them to the flash drive. I received and IO error. I did a little searching and found that the boot option I used provides no media support, including flash drives. I popped the disk out and tried System Rescue. It didn’t even see the Windows partition.
It was now noon. After several hours of screwing with my computer the only thing I had accomplished was finishing off the rest of the Dick’s Danger Ale in the fridge. My computer was a bucket of fail.
Technically, that is a picture of a bucket of fail inside my bucket of fail, making the computer a meta-bucket of fail.
My wife came home for lunch around this time. She asked how the battle was going. I explained to her the problem I was having. I figured the next step would be to slave the drive into another Windows box and pull the pictures across. Since our other computers are the Linux HTPC and an old Powerbook G4, I would have to take the drive somewhere else. This is when the day took a dramatic upswing. She gave me the OK to build a new desktop. She told me to spec out two systems, a miserly one like I usually cobble together and a higher end one. I fired up Newegg and got to work.
I started by designing the low end system with guts identically to my Linux box:
AMD BE-2300 CPU
AM2/AM3 Motherboard
4 GB PC6400 Memory
750 GB Western Digital HD
DVD burner
Since the BE-2300 is no longer available, I bumped it to an Athlon II X2 245 CPU. I figured I could salvage the wireless NIC, PSU and case from the existing system; putting the total around $300.00. For the higher end system, I started to spec out an Intel i5 system. I was bouncing around Anandtech and OCC, looking for motherboard recommendations when I found some information on the Athlon II X4 620 CPU. The reviews and benchmarks for the 620 put it a few paces back from the i5, but for the price, it was exactly what I was looking for.
I threw out the previous lists and came up with the following build:
AMD Athlon II X4 620 CPU
ASUS M4A785 Motherboard with on-board ATI 4200 GPU
4 GB OCZ Reaper HPC (PC28500) Memory
1 TB Western Digital Hard Drive
22X LG DVD Burner
OCZ Fatal1ty 550w PSU
Antec Two Hundred Case
The total price came in at $480.00, including a new PSU and chassis. Not a bad price for a complete quad-core system. I still have a beta of Windows 7 I can slap on, saving me the OS cost until next summer when it expires. I’ll post a review of the components and some system benchmarks once the parts arrive and I get the thing assembled.
Cheers!
Kevin
Well, there’s your problem. Looks like the CYU failed. You can’t trust a plain CYU, the cultures aren’t sophisticated enough for complicated floating point arithmetic. I have had pretty good luck with fruit-based CYUs in the past, but even a vanilla will do if you are on a budget. I would avoid Dannon’s offerings though. They still haven’t moved to a Streptococcus Thermophilus based process and so they are quickly being outpaced by dual-culture CYUs from Yoplait and Stony Field.