Grim’s Place

I’ve been running a DFI Lanparty Ultra-D mobo for the last two years. It sports an AMD Opteron 165 that I overclock around 20%. The system has been rock solid since I’ve had it… up until two months ago. I started to get random lockups. Not anything severe, just once every two or three weeks while I was gaming. Then it started to not start. I’d hit the power button and it would just beep. I’d power it down and it would come back up just fine the second time around. Then it started to swap my boot device all by itself. It would change the primary boot device to my secondary storage drive. I’d swap it back and it would be fine. This weekend, however, it completely refused to boot. I cleared the CMOS, I removed all the hardware, I removed the battery. Nothing. Finally. On Sunday evening, after sticking a PCI video card in it, I was able to boot into the BIOS and reset it to optimized defaults. The damn thing still would recognize my PCI-E video card. I don’t know what I did to get it to find it, but it decided to work. I rebooted the system, and it came back up. I powered it down for the night and when I started it up in the morning, it swapped the boot device again. I haven’t turned it off since and I made sure that my backups where up to date.

I found that DFI suggests owners do a 24 hour CMOS clear. Take the battery out, jump the CMOS clear jumper, jump the PC Speaker jumper to ON, and remove it from power for an entire 24 hours. What a crock of shit.

I was already planning on building a new system. I had the money saved but then an unexpected bill came up and blew that out of the water. I’m going Small Form Factor this time around. I’m tired of lugging a big box to LANs and hard drives have so much capacity these days.

Here’s the list:

Thermaltake LANBOX Lite VF6000BNS

ASUS P5E-VM HDMI LGA 775 Intel G35 HDMI Micro ATX Intel Motherboard

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor

CORSAIR XMS2 4GB(2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800

Thermaltake CL-P0257 Blue orb II CPU Cooler

As soon as the E8400 comes into stock, I’m buying the SOB.

Griminal Grim's Ramblings

We just signed a wireless deal with Alltel this week. 30+ phones and 10 wireless cards. I’m doing some testing this weekend on a trip up to the central part of Michigan. I’ve been using a Treo 700wx to browse the Internet and sync with our exchange server. I’ve also been accessing the Internet via my laptop, doing speed tests all the way. The service is spotty as would be expected, but when it works it pulls 400-600kbps down, 100-120kbps up. Not too shabby for being in the woods. In fact, as the title suggests, I’m posting right now on U.S. 10.

I just streamed this little gem doing 70…

*** Update ***

We’re sitting in our hotel room next to the fireplace, tuggin’ on some Michelobs, waiting for the festivities, and I’m downloading YouTube clips at 500-800kbps. The bad thing is that the “Free Wi-Fi” the hotel offers speed tests out at 128kbps down…

Griminal Grim's Ramblings