System Upgrade June '09
Geekery ahead. You've been warned. :D
As mentioned in my previous post, my computer was having issues, and I spent a lot of time trying to troubleshoot the problem. Gave up after noticing the rusted cap on one of the capacitors on the motherboard and decided to upgrade my six year old system.
Technically I never did find out what was the real cause of the problem... And I really hate not knowing. The symptoms were rather ambiguous 'cause they lead to a wide range of possibilities.
-
Random restarts. Sometimes it would be during a game; sometimes it would be while I was watching a movie. That was during the beginning when the problems started emerging. It got progressively worse as the days went on. Before I gave up, it got damned erratic. After switching on the system, it would not restart if I didn't do anything... But once I started doing something... Anything... Like opening folders... Then it would restart! Sometimes, it would wait until I got online before restarting. Sounds suspiciously like a virus, right? But I ruled viruses out when my computer would suddenly restart during boot-up. -.-"
-
Random BSODs. If the system didn't restart itself, it would sometimes crash. And the BSOD Stop errors would be quite random too. Sometimes it would point to the atapi.sys, and other times it would point to my SATA controller driver... Once it pointed to i8042prt.sys (apparently the keyboard/mouse driver) when it BSOD. Other times, it would just give a Stop error (usually 0x000000D1 error, but some other errors appear too) without pointing to any drivers.
-
Random hanging. The system would also randomly stop responding, until I reset it.
I tried a lot of things to find the source of the problem once it was obvious it wasn't a virus/software problem. I noticed that my system temperature was at 41 degrees celsius, so I thought it could be an overheating problem (which I've had before I got rid of my processor's stock heatsink and fan, and installed a better one). Opened up my system... And erm... Cleaned this out.
After cleaning the heatsink above out, along with the fan, and a lot of dust from all sorts of places from the chassis, the temp went down to 28 degrees on first boot. Gradually went up and lingered around 32 degrees. I figured, "Okay! It was a heat issue! I've got it fixed!" Then the computer crashed again. Sigh.
That was when I started unplugging every component of the system, and testing a component at a time. And once I've exhausted every troubleshooting idea I could think of and was able to do, I gave up and decided to blame it on the rusted over leaked capacitor that I had seen earlier when I removed the heatsink. Hahaha. =P
Which left me in need of new computer parts. A dead six-years old motherboard meant I had to either buy a new/used six-years-old motherboard (I don't think it's possible to find a new one), or replace the motherboard and everything else necessary that was obsolete. That meant I needed :
-
New motherboard, obviously.
-
New processor.
-
New RAM.
-
New graphics card.
-
And possibily new Power Supply Unit (PSU).
I was hoping to re-use my old PSU since it was less than a year old, I believe. And I wasn't that happy to let my graphics card go since it was quite new too. Oh well. I went online either using my brother's PDA or the library's computer (yes, I know, how sad!) to research new computer parts. I took 3 days to properly research items that were within reasonable budget and here's a list of what I bought!
-
Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 2.78 GHz processor (S$257 with mobo below)
-
Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L Micro-ATX motherboard (S$257 with CPU above)
-
Leadtek PX9600GT 512 MB PCI-E graphics card (S$149)
-
Kingston PC6400/800 2 GB DDR2 RAM (S$36 - so cheap now!)
-
Internal multi-card reader (S$15)
-
Andyson 530 Watts power supply unit (S$79)
-
Service charge for upgrading my system for me (S$15 - SO CHEAP!)
What I bought were not the latest or the fastest (or even the cheapest actually), but I figured I had a good compromise on what I need, to do what I usually do with my computer, with a good overhead on the processing power. I went a bit over budget since the total damage amounted to S$551. S$51 above budget was still okay, I suppose. :) I bought only 2 GB of RAM since I don't need much more than that for now, and when I do, it's easily upgradeable, so it's no big deal. I bought a lower-end mid-range graphics card for that same reason. The motherboard and processor package was chosen on compromise between power and budget. Haha.
When I was choosing my components, I checked the prices of, initially, 3 shops in Sim Lim Square : Bell Systems, Fuwell and PC Themes. Fuwell quickly dropped out because of their higher prices (plus I've read in forums that their service is getting lousier!), and after calculating between the components + service charge of the remaining shops, PC Themes was hands-down the clear winner.
Bell Systems give a 2% discount if you pay by cash (yeah yeah, we all know this trick), but when I compare the prices this shop and PC Themes give, even after the 2% discount, Bell Systems' stuff are on average about S$10 more than PC Themes' stuff. That is, per item! And the best part was when I asked each shop for their prices for helping me upgrade the new parts to my existing system, Bell Systems told me they charge S$50! Compared to PC Themes' S$15! No contest at all! PC Themes won!
But Bell Systems > Fuwell, for sure. And PC Themes > Bell Systems. Haha.
PC Themes' guys were quite friendly and they did a pretty good job with cabling up 4 my harddisks. I'm not 100% happy with how they racked up the harddisks though, since they laid 3 of the harddisks on top of each other. There were a bit of space they could have left between each harddisk, but for neat cabling, they did what they did. 2 of the harddisks are Western Digital Green Powers, which runs cooler than normal harddisks, so I guess it's not that bad. Plus I had already attached harddisk fans to all of the harddisks, except 1. I'll rearrange my harddisks' placements some day I suppose. Maybe when I buy my 2nd stick of 2 GB RAM. :D
All in all, though, PC Themes is highly recommended, and I thank Jr and Amir for introducing the shop to me years ago. Cheap and good, indeed! Haha.
No picture of the new upgraded system, 'cause it still looks basically the same from outside. Think I will have photos galore in my next entry (which won't be geekified, I promise).
