going back any farther would be trying at best…

Ok, the second Monday of the month I started my new job (still there at the time I am writting this) the last week of the month I ordered a Sheeva Wall Computing Plug Developers kit (wikipedia page, Marvell page, where to buy the developers kit) estimated shipping 6 – 8 weeks, was hoping it would arrive on my B-day…

I already added the tags for this page (and there are a lot) so I’m just going to jump down to May 2009…

I decided it was time to upgrade my computer, I had an HP Pavillion A730n with a Pentium4 530 3.0GHz HT and 2.5 GB of 184 pin DDR1 PC3200 RAM, I did have a GeForce 8800GT in it at least.  So, I bought some new hardware to build my own computer (much cheaper, and you really can pay as you go…) 

 Total spent (including shipping) $514

I missed out on all the mail in rebates, because you only get 21 days to get them sent in AND you cannot return or exchange something if you clip the UPC out.  well it actually is a good thing I didn’t do it, as I had to return the RAM I bought for a replacement (accidently got the DDR2 the first time)

Added the HDD’s I already own, a Rosewill 450W powersupply I already had (almost 2 years old) and used an HDMI cable to connect it to my 42″ Sony TV, had a heck of a time setting everything up, first there was a BIOS update so that my CPU and RAM would be recognized by the MB.  Then they were correctly identified in all ways but one… the MHz rating on the CPU was showing as 800MHz per core, and the ram was coming up as 7-7-7-24 (and still does, but this does not bother me, after what I was using before)

Everything was starting to work ok, I had my system running stable and had started installing my apps again (was using Windows Vista Ulitmate x64) and a new BIOS update was available, I gave it a shot and it fixed some of the “automatically detected” settings in the BIOS so I was happy.  Well then I tried going dual monitor with a 19″ HDTV I have, that way I did not have to remote in when my wife was watching tv in order to do anything.  That is when all the problems started happening.  The computer would just turn off randomly after 4-30 minutes of use.  So I submitted a help ticket with ECS as when I dug into it, co-workers started to tell me it sounded like a “bad pipeline in the video card” which just happens to be the on-board video (AIT Radeon 3300HD).

After I was given that information, I started testing it, and sure enough, if I ran SETI at home GPU edition, the computer would crash, if I loaded the ATI Catalyst Control Center and went to the 3D settings screen, as soon as the demo animated the PC would crash, if I loaded World of Warcraft, the PC would crash before it even finished loading the login screen (note here, I was playing WoW on this computer before; however it would crash faster and faster.  It started after 2 hours of play, then each time after that was quicker and quicker and at first I thought it was the game), so I quit playing WoW as I could not get it to work, not even after new video drivers came out.  I Tried DDO Unlimited when it went free, the Game would crash as soon as it tried to load the characters on character select.  After a few hundred attempts to get something to work, I finally got a pop-up message from windows, telling me the Video Card Driver had recovered from an unexpected crash.

 ok, so I covered part of July in there too, new post and I’ll pickup some June stuff then move on…