Geek gear incoming.

I ordered one of these tonight:

It's a Sapphire ATI Radeon 4870 1GB video card. It's a ridiculous beast of a card that grossly outclasses everything else in my PC. And I don't care. I want it.

I'm slowly rebuilding my once mighty PC into a modern gaming rig. When I put it together in early 2006, it wasn't a world-conquering monster, but it was still pretty menacing, and would beat the hell out of just about any game I wanted to play. But over time the upgrades slowed down and finally stopped. I haven't been able to play any new games that I actually want in nearly two years (aside from Half-Life 2: Episode Two and Call of Duty 4, due to their versatile game engines). I've filled the time with older games that I can run well, but that will only take you so far.

So in the last few months I started upgrading again. I bought a new case, a monolithic all-aluminum Rocketfish based on this Lian Li box. Then last week I installed a new 36" rounded EIDE cable for my hard drives (due to the size of the new case and for better cooling) and a very decent Apevia 680W power supply, which jumped from $80 when I bought it to $110 today, so I got lucky there. Now I'm adding a mid-to-high-range vidcard for an absurdly reasonable $150.

That leaves the RAM, which is still just 1GB PC3200, and my processor, a single-core AMD64 4000+. Both are still very usable, and I can upgrade them. The socket 939 is old, but can take a dual-core CPU. But the new vidcard will be downward-compated (so to speak) since I don't have PCI-e 2.0. So the next step really should be to upgrade the motherboard, CPU, and RAM all at once. That can't happen right now, or even in the foreseeable future.

That's why I bought the 4870. It will run anything I throw at it, and should make up for the CPU and RAM for a while. It opens up two to three years worth of games to me (Bioshock, Saint's Row 2, CoD: World at War, Oblivion, Fallout 3), and will make many of the games I already have much, much more enjoyable (S.T.A.L.K.E.R., CoD 4, Ghost Recon: AW, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, and more).

Oh, and I bought a Shane Battier Grizzlies replica jersey, the old 2001-2003 style. I've wanted one for eight years. It's in pristine condition and I paid less than four bucks for it. I'm wearing it right now. Pics will follow, because I think of all the stuff I bought today, this one makes me the happiest.

Starting over. Again.

I reinstalled Windows this weekend. It has been an ordeal. I'm not happy about it. Here's why:*

I never actually got around to blogging about this, but a couple months ago I bought a new case, gutted my PC, and performed transplant surgery. The procedure was only moderately successful. Due to the sheer size of the new box, I've needed a new power supply unit and a new EIDE cable ever since. It works, but until I buy the afforementioned replacement parts, I can only run one hard drive and one optical drive, and my current PSU is hanging off the motherboard instead of being solidly attached to the bottom of the box as it should be.

Meanwhile, my OS has been getting more and more unstable. I haven't reinstalled in two years, and even before that, I had severe boot issues that were never resolved. Last Thursday my video card started overheating, which, on top of everything else, was just... just super. I discovered that its fan was no longer turning properly. I can't tell if the bearings are wearing or if it's just out of lubricant, but it doesn't matter because I disassembled the entire thing and I can't fix it.

This is the point where I said, "Fuck it." Using Jenny's computer, I pulled everything I wanted to save off of my primary, 250GB hard drive and my secondary, 100GB drive (that I haven't been able to use lately), burned it to disc, installed the 100 gigger back into my PC as the main drive, and put a clean install of XP Pro on it (that I luckily happened to have lying around).

Without a proper video card, I'm back to running on my mobo's Xpress 200 chipset, but at least everything is working. I can even boot normally, which means I was right in my long-held theory that there's a bad sector somewhere on my 250 gigger that caused the boot problems that survived the system restore two years ago.

So now, after two days of updating drivers, rebooting, updating Windows, rebooting, reinstalling critical software, rebooting, updating Windows again, rebooting, and updating Windows again, all I have to do is buy and install a new 20"+ EIDE cable, a new video card, and a new ATX PSU with at least 7 auxilliary connectors. And hope that my 250GB HD isn't a piece of shit.

So, yeah. Fun three-day weekend.

*you don't care why, but I'm posting it anyway