Sunday, September 9, 2012

Software Installed

Spent most of the weekend installing software on Diane's new machine. The OS installation appeared to have a problem at first because it didn't have a network installed (ARG) but this turned out to be that I needed to install the software that came with the motherboard. The network drivers were there.

I then copied the Thunderbird and Mozilla (FireFox) profiles from %APPDATA% from the old machine to the new one. Then I installed Thunderbird and FireFox and, like wow, all of Diane's settings came over without a hitch. (This is what happens when you DON'T hide things in the registry.)

From there I installed McAfee and it went without a hitch. Then I installed Acronis, and everything seemed to be going well. Too well. I tried to restore Diane's last backup into an empty directory so she could move over files at her leisure, and the restores kept messing up with odd messages about being out of resources. I then tried to copy the backup files off the NAS and got a similar message. Finally I tried a good old fashion COPY command. Still no Joy. I finally decided a 109GB backup file can't be handled by a 32-bit version of Windows. So, we're going to just copy files individually from the old machine via USB if necessary.

After I gave up on restoring the backup, I moved the machine into Diane's computer desk and removed the old machine. The only problem that I had was some of the USB ports weren't working. Googling the issue lead me to "uninstalling" the malfunctioning USB ports (in the operating system sense of uninstalling) and rebooting the machine. The OS then reinstalled the drivers for the USB ports and they all started working.

So, Diane has now installed Civ 5 and I think that it is working.

If I get a chance, I'll put up the final build parts soon. I took a lot of notes and meant to create a Build blog entry, but when I installed the new motherboard, I didn't bother taking notes, so I'm not sure how useful the instructions are now.

Friday, September 7, 2012

Success!

OK, I finally have a machine that runs. Yea!

Last night I called Fry's, told them what was up, and asked what was next. The associate on the phone sent me to the Returns department. The nice guy there, Chris, sounded like he had heard this one before, and said that they would have to verify that the part failed before they would take it back. I told him that I'd like to bring the machine in tomorrow morning. He said he would not be there, but the Returns department would be able to help me out.

So, I took the machine into the Returns department, told them about Chris, and they sent me to the Service department, where they told me that there would be a $90 charge and they would determine what the problem was. There would be an additional charge for the replacement part. I told him that I wasn't going to pay for them to determine that Fry's had sold me a bad motherboard and left. Then I headed for the Motherboard department.

In the Motherboard department, I got a more sympathetic reception. The guy looked at the machine, said that it looked like I put it together correctly, and then said that he couldn't help any further, except to tell me that Chris would be in at 2. I said I would be back.

After work, I returned to Fry's, headed directly back to Motherboards and asked for Chris. Unfortunately, no one knew where he was. While they looked for him, I looked at new motherboards. There didn't seem to be a replacement motherboard at a similar price, so if it was the motherboard, it was going to cost me some more money, a lot more money.

So, the mystical Chris was found, back in the Returns department! He remembered me from the night before and asked one of his Returns guys to try and figure out which component failed. We started with a demonstration of the problem. Then he put a tester on the power supply. No problems there. So we tried a known good PSU on the machine, and got the same behavior. Then we traded the VGA card, and got the same result. Then we tried known good memory, and still got the same result. At this point, Chris dropped in, got an update, and said it was hardly ever the CPU. Usually this was a problem with the motherboard. So, they asked me to go back and get a replacement board. I shrugged and headed back to the Motherboard department.

Back in Motherboards, I found a couple of cheap boards that would do, but they weren't ASUS boards. It didn't matter because they were all out of stock of these boards too, except for the Demo boards. I said that I wasn't going through that again, and picked up an ASUS Sabertooth 990FX Motherboard.

Back at Returns, we put my CPU, memory, graphics card and PSU into the new board, plugged in the monitor, flipped the PSU power switch. Fans whirred, lights blinked, the speaker beeped, and the monitor displayed the BIOS menu. Yea!

I spent sometime at the Returns desk putting the motherboard into the case and verifying that it still worked. Then I went to the checkout desk, paid the extra $100, and headed home.

I spent the rest of the evening installing the disk drives, routing the power cables better, and hooking the remaining case cables up to the motherboard. I then plugged in a USB keyboard, flipped the switch and was rewarded with a BIOS menu.

So, a some point while I was in the Motherboards department I was a sign that said that they would take any motherboard and power it up to the Power On System Test for $10. I wish I had seen that on Sunday. That would have been $10 well spent.

So next up, installing the O/S.

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Still no joy...

Well, I followed the steps described in Tom's Hardware PERFORM THESE STEPS before posting about POST/boot/no video problems! article but I didn't have any success. The only thing I didn't do was double check that the BIOS will support the FX CPU.

I also pulled the motherboard out and bread boarded the system, and still received no beep codes. Finally, I used the paperclip trick to power up the power supply and check its voltages. The EATX12V cable is producing the proper voltages, but the EATXPWR is not. I don't know if that is normal for a system whose CPU isn't running, or the sign of a problem.

Time to talk with my guru!

Monday, September 3, 2012

Update on Diane's new machine

Well, I wish that I had better news, but I can't get the new machine to come up. I don't hear any beep codes when it powers on and the monitor doesn't see any signals. I have verified that the monitor and cable works with another system. The fact that there aren't ANY beep codes is very troubling.

Sigh. Time for a break.

Here we go again

My wife's computer is dying ... A moment of silence ... And now, YEA! Diane said "Yes" to my offer to build her a new machine. YEA! Ack! I need to do it this weekend! I can't stare at specs for two weeks. I can't send my proposed machine off to my hardware guru friend Judy for her blessing. I can't even order it from Newegg and then wait impatiently for it to arrive. I have to do this now. Fortunately, I have this blog to refer to find out what I did last time. But, let me back up just a bit.

Diane's current machine is a Dell mini tower and, to be honest, I couldn't have asked for a better machine for her. Usually Diane needs a new machine every two or three years, but this XP class machine has been with us for maybe 9 or 10 years. (The previous machine was a ME class machine.) Anyway, this weekend it started having problems connecting to the network. It appeared to be connected, but it couldn't see any machines on the Internet and barely could connect to the router. I spent a couple of days trying to figure out what was wrong. At first, I thought it was the network card, so I put the NIC from the ME machine (I really need to recycle that machine) into the XP machine, and it didn't help. I thought that perhaps it was a problem with the DNS on the router, but doing some simple tests seemed to eliminate that possibility. I thought about taking the machine up to my work to see how it behaved on another network to eliminate the router. I also searched the Internet for similar issues, but I didn't find anything useful except that the error code 0x5b4 is a Time Out. Ultimately, I decided that Diane has been waiting for a new machine since she discovered in 2010 that she couldn't play Civ 5 on her XP machine, so I just decided to get her a new machine rather than chase this problem any further. I should have done this in June when she and I first discussed it. If I had done that, I wouldn't be making a crash job, so I have no one but myself to blame.

Anyway, I started with investigating the current state of hardware since my last foray into HTPC land. I purposely stayed with AMD CPU's. I worked at Texas Instruments for 8 years and Motorola for 2, so I'm afraid that I still see Intel as "the other guys". And, even though Steve from work tells me that Intel is making better CPU's than AMD these days, and Rick the IT guy at work is empathic that Intel is the best and "AMD is crap", I'm going to stick with AMD because I see them as the home team. After some investigating and looking at the Civ 5 specs, I decided on an AMD Athlon II X4. From this I found a couple of ASUS mother boards that I liked, the M5A97 and the Sabertooth. However, since I was gearing up for a shopping trip to Fry's and I didn't have a clue what they had a stock, I decided that I was going to have to take the plunge and decide on the remaining items on the fly.

At Fry's I started with looking at the available motherboards. They had the Sabertooth in stock, as well as the M5A97. Even though the M5A97 is based on the AMD 970 north bridge chipset, and Sabertooth on the 990FX, I ultimately decided that the M5A97 was sufficient to run Civ 5, and was cheaper. Ultimately it turned out the M5A97 was a closeout item and I have no problem with eating the last piece of cake. Unfortunately, even though the warehouse inventory said that there was one in a package in the store, the Fry's guy couldn't find it, so I ended up with the display model. It was up high in the display and difficult to get down, so I'm hoping it was not handled too much. Also since it was the display model, I got 20% off of it. There's a 15 day return policy, and I should know way before then if there's a problem.

From there, I went graphics card hunting. I was trying to stay with AMD, so I settled on a HD6450. I could have gotten a lot cheaper and a lot more expensive Radeon graphics card, but I decided on a middle of the road card. The thing that troubled me the most is that the card said that it used a PCI Express 2.1 Bus, and the M5A97 had only a 2.0 bus. So I took the HD 6450 and asked the Fry's guy over in the motherboard department if that was going to be a problem. He said that there's a PCI Express 3.0 socket on the board. That was not my recollection, but I hope that the card could probably handle a 2.0 bus too, so I decided to stick with the M5A97. (I just checked, and I was correct, it does not have a PCI Express 3.0 socket.)

The next problem was that they didn't have any Athlon CPU's. So I got an AMD FX-4100 mostly because it had 4 cores (a Civ 5 recommendation) and the lowest wattage of the available CPUs, 95 watts.

Then I looked at ATX cases. I must admit that all of the cases looked like something out of a bad science fiction movie, with all sorts of weird shapes. I settled on a CM Elite 371 because it looked like a normal computer case and because it didn't have a power supply. I wanted to get a modular power supply, and I didn't want to trust whatever cost reduced piece of junk might be in an inexpensive tower case.

From there, it was a flurry of buying the remaining items. I'm afraid that not a lot of thought was put into them.

So, here's what I finally ended up with:

ItemSizeDescription
AMD FX-410095WAM3+, 64-bit 3.6Ghz, Quad Core CPU
ASUS M5A97AM3+Motherboard with AMD 970 Northbridge, 950 Southbridge, 4xDDR3 2133 (OC), 32 GB, USB 3.0, and 6.0GB/s SATA
CM Elite 371ATX Mid Tower
DDR3 Memory4 GB1333 Mhz Memory
Antec HCG-620M620 W80 Plus Certified Bronze Modular Power Supply
HD 64501GBXFX 6450 graphics card with 1 GB DDR3 memory, Direct X11 support, HDCP, 2560x1600, HDMI, Dual Link DVI, VGA, 650 Mhz core clock
WD 100000 CSRTL Green1 TBHard drive with SATA/300, 16 MB buffer
LG Internal BD-W Drive10 XBlueRay internal drive, SATA interface, MDISC Compatible, 3D Playback
Windows 7 Home OEM SP132-bit

The final cost, about $670, not including tax.

Tomorrow I'll build this beastie and we'll see if I know what I'm doing.