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  Building Papa's new Computer
"Father and Son Project"		 Saturday 31st December 2005  

  

 

  People seem to like to give me stuff that I have to put together for Christmas. I think it gives them two pleasures; the pleasure of giving, and the thought of me struggling over a manual.   I am a guy, and as such, I don't stop to ask for directions and I don't use manuals.  I think they are the place you turn when you don't have any more creative ,albeit ridiculous, ideas.  Last year Bill Sears sent me a model of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle.  I could hack that together without the manual because I lived in one for a couple of years.   If you wake up in the commanders cupola to the sound of a main battle tank tossing a 120-mm round down range and bang your head on the thermal sight you have a tendency to remember were it goes in the model.      

"You like to Build things."

I have built a computer in the past but I figured out that it saved me about $200. Also six months after I built it the company that made the video card went out of business.  I decided after that little exercise that I was going to ordered my computers from Dell.  My Son's computer was starting to show it's age so I priced a new computer.   It was going to cost me $4,000 which I thought was about right, but Cheryl thought it was a little high.   She said to me in a challenging voice, "You like to build things."   Now I'm not sure how I got this reputation but it is not deserved .   I don't even know were the "Home Depot" is, Cheryl does but even she has given up even trying to drag me to one. If is doesn't have a computer chip in it I really don't care about it. She does all of the projects around the house and I don't even own a set of tools anymore.  I think, she thinks that I might enjoy building a computer because she believes me when I tell her, "Matthew and I are rebuilding his computer."  It is not a lie, it's a misunderstanding. When a software geek says he is rebuilding a computer he means loading drivers and re-installing software not screwing stuff together.   Of course once your wife challenges you, you have to act on it, no matter how stupid the idea. So as a holiday activity Matthew and I decided to build a new computer.  If you mistakenly think this allowed me to redeem my manhood it didn't. While Matthew and I were building the computer, Cheryl was replacing all of the door knobs in the house.  $300 dollars worth of door knobs. She also took my car in to get the tires replaces, got it inspected, and had the oil changed. Just to prove the point that, Cheryl is more Women than I deserve and more Man than I will ever be, I had to ask Matthew to see if we could borrow a screw driver from her since mine was a little big for the backplane screws.   She asked, "What size?"  This stumped us both, so he brought her one of the screws. She takes a quick look at the screw and tells him, "It's a Phillips #1.    She hands him a Phillips #1 screwdriver and then sternly tells him, "Don't let your Father use this as a hole punch.  In her defense I have done that in the past, and that is why she has her own tools.

In building the computer I started off with the most important thing first, the Graphics Card.  I got a nVidia  GeForce 7800 GPU (Graphics Card)  which also means that I needed a new motherboard that would support this card so I picked up nForce 4 Motherboard. I tired to explain this to Cheryl but her eyes glazed over when I got to PCI express and data transfer rates. It was also an excuse to let me use an AMD chip. A lot of my geek buddies have told me how fast they are and that they give off less heat.  I ended up with an AMD64fx chip which my gaming friends tell me is a screaming fast chip.  This stuff is not cheap, of course the other parts that you need to put together a computer aren't cheap either.  I suppose I could have taken apart one of the five computers I have and reused some of the parts but the good  computers I wanted to keep and the bad one really didn't have anything in it that was reusable.   Actually I did pull the floppy drive out of it but I don't think I am going to keep it in the machine any ways.  I only needed it to load a driver during the install.


I decide to do this a few weeks before Christmas.   Matthew and I have been having a tough time lately.  I blame it on him turning 14 and he blames it on my poor parenting skills. I would guess putting on my web site that we having a tough time qualifies as poor parenting skills.    I figure building a computer together will be a really good bonding opportunity.  It has all of the the things we like.  We get to spend "my"  money  on stuff that he will be able to use.   He always gets my old technology so if I get a new MP3 player he gets the old one.  If I get a new computer, he gets the old one.   You better believe when we walk around a computer store he is always pointing out the newest and coolest stuff, that I should buy.   We upgraded his computer a couple of weeks ago by putting a RAID zero controller and increasing the memory by a gig and a half.  Which you really can't do, you have to put buy two sticks of memory a  hundred bucks apiece and then toss away the half a gig stick that was in the computer to start, since the computer only has two slots. Of course none of the other computers I have can use this type of memory so it ends up in a box of good but useless computer parts that I keep.   Anyway $500 dollars later his machine is pretty fast, so I wasn't sure why he would want to help me upgrade my machine. He explains it to me over lunch, my treat of course.  "Papa if you build a new computer then we can give Katie your machine."  I thought he was being thoughtful, but he is 14 so the puzzled look on my face made him continue.   He went on, "Then when my friends come over they can play on Katie's computer and I can play on mine across our LAN." You see most of his games don't work on Katie's current computer so it was obviously time to upgrade my computer.

Outsource to India

Any way we decided that we need to go to Fry's Electronics.  If you think this is going to be a shameless plug for Fry's you're wrong.   Fry's is like going to Wallmart except no one there knows anything about the stuff they sell, or even where to find it.    Build-one.jpgI once got passed from one clueless employee to another about 5 times,  when I finally gave up and asked to see a manager because they had sent me from one end of the store to another too many times.  They sent me across the store to look for him.   He couldn't come to me to hear me complain about being sent all around the store.  I had to go find him.  

Even though I'm not happy about going to Fry's they do normally have the stuff we need so we built a list and headed off.  We needed about $1,300 more of stuff to go with the $1,500 worth of stuff I already have.  We need some memory, hard drives, power supply, fans, DVD drive, memory card readers and unfortunately a computer case.   We found all of the stuff we needed except the case.  The ones they had were either underpowered, under-cooled ,or not "cool."  

I brought Matthew to ensure that I bought a "cool" case.  The rest of the stuff is hidden inside of the case so no one knows if it is cool but the case is very visible.  One of them looked a lot like a vacuum cleaner which I thought might be cool to Matthew, because it looked kind of stupid to me, but surprisingly it looked stupid to him as well.    The one we finally decided on, was on display but not in stock.  We forked over $950 bucks for the stuff they had in stock and put the case on order.   Well at least I thought it was on order.  It was suppose to come in two weeks ago on Tuesday and I still have not heard about it. We ended up buying one on-line for a little less money and it showed up two days before the Christmas shutdown.   I drove over to check on the case a couple of times after giving up trying to call them.  Fry's is the only place I would recommend outsourcing their phone support to India, it could only be an improvement.    I showed up and asked about the case the day after it was suppose to arrive but it was not in, and they could not tell me when it was suppose to come in.   I checked on it again the next week, which was the week before Christmas and it was not in and the supervisor told me he didn't know anything about it and was pretty sure it was not on order.     If you want  a nice case I'd recommend Xoxide  they shipped it fast and it was $70 less than Fry's.

Feed me

The day we had everything together we started off by going to the Southlake Tavern for Lunch. Build-two.jpg It was a day off and Matthew is a teenager so starting just after lunch is just like starting at the crack of dawn.   It also put us in a good mood.  If you are going to build a computer from the motherboard up you need to start off in a good mood.

It was a lot of fun buying the stuff, but looking at all of the stuff piled on the dinning room table wasn't as much fun as you might imagine.  I had already put some of the parts together. The processor arrived with a few of the pins out of line so I pulled out my old Army knife and aligned them.   Matthew and his mother gotten into a small tiff so I ended up putting the CPU fan on by myself that same day. The fan didn't fit and but after I ripped the fan mounting bracket off the motherboard it looked like it was lined up OK.   I have to admit I really don't understand thermal grease.  I would think that the CPU should be attached firmly to the heat sink but I followed the instructions and put on the grease. The fan slid around like, well like it was greased. Which made me a little nervous.   I like to do the things I don't know how to do alone. Which means I do a lot of stuff alone.  Maybe I should have read the manual this time but  what fun would that be.  





Where the heck does this thing go?

Matthew and I lay on the floor and start to open boxes.  Build-three-w-cartoon.jpgThe computer case has five fans not counting the two in the power supply.  I'm happy about this because my last machine would over-heated in the summer and I had to leave the case open with a big window fan blowing air into it to stop it from blue screening on me.   The fans have to be hooked up in order and they each have a blue led which glows brighter as they speed up.   This is very cool to Matthew but I suspect will be less "cool" to Cheryl when she is trying to sleep since my "office" is also our bedroom.

We also have the motherboard mounted and the GPU installed. You might notice that the Graphics card is uninstalled in the next photo that is normal.  We will install and uninstall just about everything at least four times.  So in a way Matthew and I built four computers over the holidays.   I had to pull the card so I could mount the hard drives.  I then had to pull it again so I could mount the floppy drive and again to plug the internal USB connector and connect the internal card reader.  

We did wonder if what we were doing was right a number of times. The phrase, "Is this right?  Does that look right to you?  This can't be right!"  was used a lot during the install.

Matthew thought that the extra blue LED's at each corner were very nice but I thought I would cut the wires on them since I didn't think Cheryl would enjoy four extra  little blue lights in our "office."   Luckily I didn't have to cut the wires because I never did figure out how to hook them into the system.

I really like the fan that is in the side of the case since it blows the air out from the hottest part of the computer.  It sets right over the CPU and the GPU.  The problem is, that it is has to get power so once you hook it up, it is wired to the system which means it is in the way all of the time.   The wires also have to positioned out of the way of the CPU fan. The first time we fired it up there was this ticking as the wire fell into the blades of the CPU fan.    

My mom who stays with us over the winter was sitting in the living room watching us struggle with all of this and wondering if it would take us all week to put it together.  I told her we would have it together before dinner.  Now moving all of the software and installing two operating systems on it that might take the rest of the Christmas holidays.   I also would have to move software and data on the two computers that were getting replaced so a week might be optimistic.


A professional job has a professional look.

One of my partners puts together IBM systems and Build-four.jpgthey spend a lot of time making sure that the wires are bundled up.  It does two things; it looks professional, and it helps the airflow which keeps the system cool.   I spent a lot of time just trying to keep the wires out of the fans.   I also noticed that I was going to end up with a lot "spare" parts.  I was reminded of this by my mother as she said, "Why do they give you so many extra parts?"  

I really don't know why.  I suppose some of them make the corner LED lights light up.  Some of them came with the hard drives and the mother board. I have enough SATA cables to connect up another ten drives.   I have bags of stuff some of it is in case you are putting in an Intel processor and not an AMD processor and some of it is just there to make me wonder, "What the heck is this part for?"

You also should notice that there are no photos of Matthew and I working, that is because everyone tried to stay out of our way during the build. Matthew also released me from our normal 50¢ per swear word deal.  It doesn't count when I work on computers anyway but he thought he would be nice and not make me pay him more than the computer was worth in fines.   I don't think I swore that much but it was very thoughtful of him to let me off the hook.  I know I would have been into him for at least five bucks for the project.  For example I would have owed him a buck fifty for the one time I asked him, "Where is the internal USB port and he said, "Under the graphics card."



Somebody better clean up this mess.

We got the system up and running in about four hours.  That means that it booted up, Build-five.jpgthe BIOS saw everything it was suppose to see and the OS was starting to install.  I run Linux and Windows.  You have to install Windows first since Microsoft thinks multi-boot is Windows 98, Windows ME, and Windows XP. Linux is smart enough to find Windows and mount the drives so you can see the whole system. Building a computer is pretty easy, loading all of the software and moving data between the old system and the new one is a pain.  Of course once the computer was built to this stage, Matthew was asking if a friend could come over.  Our bonding was over.  You can not really bond over rebooting a PC 25 times while you load patches and software.

We left the flotsam laying on the dining room floor.   You will notice that Cheryl's Number One Phillips screwdriver has been returned or maybe she retrieved it, either way it is the only thing that was picked up after the project was completed.

I did clean everything up later that day so Santa wouldn't trip over the stuff when he came by on Christmas.  I still ended up with a bunch of extra stuff.   Maybe I'll use it to build my next computer.   Of course that will not be for at least another six years. I think I will be buying the next couple computers already built. Maybe when Katie is 14 I'll try and do it again with her.   Of course since she is a girl maybe her Mom will have her out in the garage rebuilding a transmission or something. 



Cool Blue lights.

You have to admit it does look kind of cool in the dark.   Build-six.jpgIt is quieter than my old computer. I'll find out this summer, but I hope it is going to be cooler. Cheryl hasn't complained about the light so far and I always turn off the computer before I go to bed so I think it will be OK.   I did try my best to keep the wires away from the high speed fans. I'm colorblind so I don't know if the cables are cool or not.   I'm told that some of them are green and some are yellow but my family always goofs on me about color so they could be goldenrod and lime for all I know.

I have been working on getting all of the software transfered over for the last week and I still don't have it all done.   I did get a couple of games with it so I have wasted way too much time trying to get the balloon card for the French army unlocked in Ages of Empire III.    You have to play the game to understand what a complete waste of time I just said is, but it is the truth.

I wonder if I could write the great American Novel if only I didn't have TiVo and didn't use the computer more to attack naval shipping then I do to write.  

The computer is blinding fast.   I have tried everything I know to get it to overheat and lag up but it is a screamer.    I have dual monitors and I have loaded up DVD video and the nVidia GPU demos on one monitor, while I edit photos and play flight simulator on the other. It doesn't make a lot of sense but it is a pretty good test. If anything was going to overheat the system that should do it.  I guess I got the thermal grease spread out on my slippery CPU right.   The system has a "Volume" control for each set of fans.  If you turn them all the way up it sounds like your testing a jet in a wind tunnel.  The lights also brighten so it looks like a spotlight sale.  Luckily the system seems to run fine on the minimum setting so I can work in the office without having to wear my earplugs and sunglasses 




Cool Computer, but

I'm certainly not a Linux geek.   I do run it as my desktop at work and use it forBuild-seven.jpg just about everything except gaming.   Most of the games I own run on Windows so I loaded up Windows on this machine and then loaded up Linux. The first thing I noticed is that the install screen changed. I assume it is the Christmas screen install.    It did tie into the warning message that came up because I'm running a AMD64fx chip.  

Cool Computer, but...
You are about to install 32-bit software on a 64-bit computer

It did allow me to continue the install since the chip will support 32-bit software.    I assume the "Cool" was why the penguins had Santa hats and ice was on the install menu.    I don't think so now because when I installed SuSE 10.0 on the machine I traded out for  Katie's, new computer the install screen is the same without the cool computer part.

Hers was the oldest one we had (that I didn't swap out for parts)   I will have to pull down the 64-bit version of SUSE but I can only do that inside the firewall and I didn't want to drive down to the office and sit around while I downloaded a DVD over the Christmas break.

I'm not sure this was as much of a Father and Son project as I thought it would be.  Matthew did help a lot and did do some of the work. We picked out everything together and he did stick with me right up until I started to load Windows.   I guess when all is said and done we did build a computer together and some memories.

All in all it was a pretty good Christmas.


 

 

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