[DJ]

Sort of.

Long story short: My Gateway I bought 3 years ago was a total piece of trash, and the proprietary case prevented me from putting any new parts in it without doing fun things like boring new holes in the side for screws to fit properly. The motherboard also had the charming habit of causing RAM damage in any graphics card I put in there because it was a cheap POS and couldn't meter the voltage to the PCI-E slot correctly. I went through four cards -- luckily the company I got the card from is awesome and replaced each one for free as it died, even giving me a minor upgrade to a better card this last time around.

Still, to replace the motherboard would've cost $220, since I'd voided the warranty by opening my computer.

Finally, enough being enough, I pulled the side off and proceeded to savage my computer's corpse for usable parts. I got the original CPU and hard drive out, and got a new 550v power supply, new, faster RAM, and a standard form-factor motherboard.

The discarded shell:



Note the giant, no-fan, irregularly shaped and oriented heatsink. Most heatsinks for these kinds of chips have a square base, but nooo, that would've been too easy to replace! Gateway has a custom screw placement explicitly to prevent you from fucking with their setup. Ditto for pretty much every possible aspect of the computer. There's always some little thing that prevents you from replacing a part with anything off the shelf.

Anyway, after getting all this stuff in a new case and booting up, I found a final little "fuck you" from Gateway. My hard drive was partitioned, with an emergency restore partition on there. Little did I know, the way it was set up, the emergency backup bit always boots first and runs a quick system check.

It found out it was plugged into a new motherboard, and promply freaked out and formatted itself. I'm not sure what this was supposed to accomplish besides pissing the customer off, but lemme tell you, nothing like booting up a new computer, having it shunt to Windows task screen, reboot itself, and have the motherboard bios announce "Missing OS" once it reboots. Fun fun fun.

One full drive format and a pirated perfectly legitimate copy of Windows XP later, I am now, finally, free of the tyranny of prefabricated computers designed to rape you right through your pants if you so much as think of changing their layout.

The new hotness:



The processor's the same as was in the Gateway, a single-core 3400mhz Pentium 4. It's aging, but honestly processors don't count for a whole lot. I haven't found anything that seems noticeably degraded by it.

RAM's an upgrade from 4GB DDR 400mhz to 2GB DDR2 at 533mhz, and the difference there is massive. Less actual RAM, but things load so much faster.

And the free GPU upgrade was a nice boost as well. It runs BioShock real good.



I have to re-acquire all my music, but the quick checklist of necessary programs (photoshop, winrar, diskeeper, nero, alcohol 120, registry mechanic, open office, fraps, utorrent, etc.) are all present and accounted for and holy hell are things much nicer now.

Anything else I should look into for my fresh start?
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[km]

Looking now that case wasn't non-standard, it was just not ATX which everyone is used to. It was a BTX case, which actually has quite a few advantages in terms of cooling.

However, yeah, sounds like your PSU or motherboard was shot so you needed new shit anyway. And that CPU cooler mounting bracket being non-standard sucks.
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vi) RPGs (Role-Playing Games)
For adolescents; half-formed personalities roaming (in packs) in search of identity.

[DJ]

[Corinth]

I hate going into Dell/Gateway/HP/whatever systems. Everything is a mess. The heatsink on my parents' seven year old Dell is so weird and twisted that it actually confused me when I was trying to use it as a reference for putting together my own first machine back in the day.

[sync-swim]

The Acer prefab I co-opted for a desktop was surprisingly non-horrendous on the inside and came with minimal bloatware preloaded.

Four RAM slots (a miracle for a prefab), one PCI-Express 16x and another 1x, four open HD bays and SATA thankfully.

It's likely I'm simply on a lucky streak; my four-year-old eMachines laptop has an easy access RAM chip and the hard drive can be removed and replaced literally as easy as slotting a Nintendo cartridge.

[Kappuru]

The emachines I have is pretty decent. I don't play PC games at all though!
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[kf]

550v power supply bish !!

I've always had a soft spot in my heart for eMachines hardware but they're just fairly reliable platforms to build with thumbscrews on the case assembly. I've had my current one since 2002 and the original hard drive froze like a thing that is freezing but hey they do that. The mobo and cpu have since been replaced, but I still use dinosaur rams.
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[EmX]

If you buy a computer from an OEM the first thing you should do is blow away whatever's on the hard drive and reinstall windows and the software that came with it selectively

New motherboards usually break windows though, so reformatting was inevitable

[DJ]

[Toptube]

in the latter end of the athlon xp and the early end of the athlon 64, Emachines was putting out some amazing bang for buck machines, that were actually pretty rock solid and despite coming with integrated video---included an agp or PCI-E slot for later upgrades and had real nvidia n-force motherboards.

its seems they only kept this momentum for about 2 years though, cuz now they seem to be pretty much as cheap as they can get. but I remember for awhile, people were like, hey, Emachines.

[Panoptic]

I used to work with those Cooler Master cases a lot. I like their completely tool-less 5.25" and 3.5" bay mounting system.

Also used to work in a shop that only sold HP/Compaq systems. Hated working on their cases as well, but I was pretty good tearing down HP/Compaq/Dell systems by the time I left.

[DJ]

[boojiboy7]

Nice exact same case as me.

[Gironika]

aaah, I love Siemens (Fujitsu Siemens now)-systems for their wildly paranoiac use of some special bolts ... after starting with a 486 DX with 25MHz and working my way through several generations of Siemens-crap up to a 486 DX4-S 100MHz system, I decided that I'll never touch a Siemens-system again if it's not for stripping them of their HDD, RAM, CPU etc. Even if they were gifts.


Currently having a AMD64 3000+ (I'll update soon), a AM2-socket board from Asus and 1 gig RAM ...
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[CubaLibre]

I am a huge fan of ibuypower.com.

I don't understand why anyone - anyone - would buy a computer from the big prefab companies. It just makes no sense. I mean, other than the fact that they're the only ones with advertising.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[km]

[alice]

how much does one have to blow on a video card nowadays to play crysis and bioshock?

[Panoptic]

[CubaLibre]

[km]

Ever Dell I've seen in the last 5 years has had a(n)AGP/PCI-E 16x slot, at least 2 PCI slots, and easy to get to hard drive cages. Motherboard layout has been at WORST acceptable. Power supplies are standard...

I actually have no idea what you are even talking about. The cases are even easy to open.


The only thing I can think of is sometimes the CPU cooler is funky.
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vi) RPGs (Role-Playing Games)
For adolescents; half-formed personalities roaming (in packs) in search of identity.

[DJ]

[km]

eVGA is known for fantastic customer service as well.
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vi) RPGs (Role-Playing Games)
For adolescents; half-formed personalities roaming (in packs) in search of identity.

[sync-swim]

This is the video card I got for my new desktop. The games I've tried so far, Bioshock, Oblivion and Stalker, all run without a hitch on full-blast graphics settings. It's been nominated for some sort of members' choice award on Newegg.

As of now, DX10 is still in Gimmick stage, but if you have Vista and can get a DX10 card for a civil price (I've never spent more than $150 on a video card) might as well.

I'll probably try Medieval 2 over the weekend, since until now I've been running it off strictly medieval computers.