Adventurous Philosopher

Some creative swearing later, my new PC is built. All the hardware is put together. That was not the hard part. The hard part was Vista.

 

Now, I am a geek and this OS installation had be questioning how hard I could hit my head against the wall without permanent injury. I first tried to install the beta, and had little luck. Since GR (general release) of Vista was November, I thought I might as well wait. I loaded Windows 2000 on it and it had some driver issues, but I did not care since I Vista would be out soon. Well, the PC sat there for a couple months on yet more Vista delays. To get to the good part. End of January Vista Ultimate came out.

 

I bought Vista Ultimate OEM DVD from Tiger Direct and proceeded to install it. It installed without errors. Then I made a fatal mistake… I did windows updates. Blue screen of death.. over and over and over again.

 

About 2 weeks later, I actually got it installed and it appears to be working ok. I occasionally get the blue screen of death. But this is much better then it was. I am thinking this might end up as a Linux machine. Time will tell.

 

So that ends the building the PC fun. It was an awesome experience and I am glad I did it again. However for me, I realized I have little use for desktop. Here are some tips for anyone who wants to try this:

 

1. Don’t use the newest, best hardware out. Drivers are all messed up and it is a headache. All my issues have come from buying the best before the world is ready for it.

2. Vista. Well, as pretty as this is to look at, the jury is still out on it. It needs serious power (which I have) but I am not sure it is worth it.

3. Take your time. Be patient, and make sure all your parts match (example, your motherboard is build for the chip, your memory speed is what your motherboard takes..etc). A little bit of extra research at the beginning will save you a lot of extra time later.

 

In conclusion. I built this machine for a couple reasons. One, I wanted to see what it was like to have a desktop since I am laptop girl. Two, I wanted to see vista first hand. Three, I wanted to live under the delusion that I have enough free time to get to play some windows video games. Four, it just plain sounded like fun.

I have to say, after this, I appreciate my laptop more then ever. I will stay a laptop girl. I think this PC will just be for games and a music storage device. Now, I have never had the time to play games, maybe now I will get to. I can almost hear Guild Wars calling my name. It was fun. It was interesting. I am glad it is over.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 19th, 2007 at 8:56 pm and is filed under Tech Awesomeness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.