the grunter

I just did, and it saved me at least $25 of pc inspection fee at the shop.

The story goes like this: Today I finally caved in and bought myself an eVGA 8800GT (w/512mb) and a new 500W power supply in order to use the new card without choking the system. I was bothered by the idea of having to open up the computer case and unplug/plug things, especially when upgrading a power supply is a first for me. Soon I convinced myself to stop being a lazy bastard and start installing things, so I brought along a screwdriver and a dust-trapping cloth and began tucking in this DX10 juggernaut into the case.

Turned out changing power supplies took about 10 minutes, I unplugged two ports from mobo, one from dvd-rom and one from HDD and boom done. Screwed in new sleek-looking black 500W power, this time I gotta plug in 6 ports, all the previous-mentioned ones and two more dedicated to feed the juggernaut. The idea that by installing two pieces of new hardware at the same time may complicate things when it comes to troubleshooting god forbid things don’t run smoothly, but I dismissed that idea since I am so smart.

Brought the case back to room (it got so much heavier with the new power supply), plugged everything in and I was going to grab my copy of Spore as it boots up. All of a sudden something made me turned my head immediately (I was halfway exiting my room), that dreadful, confusing long beep from the motherboard.. it beeped once, then twice, then three times.. all this time I saw no display on my samsung monitor. I shut it off. I gotta say I am quite experienced when it comes to not panicking about electronics not working the first time around because some silly small mistakes. So I simply went and made sure everything’s firmly plugged in and nothing was missed. Maybe the mobo beeps just coz I did not plug in a keyboard, and the video card wasn’t working yet due to the lack of driver. But no, the beeps went on again as I powered the system up. No, oh no.. I put my face inside the case. Good, at least nothing was fried (yet). Next I shall go to a corner and kick myself in the balls for ignoring my first instincts about installing two pieces of new hardware. No wait, I can do that after I make my pc run properly. I took the case out and unplugged all the power cables, matched each one with my old power supply and reading the manual for the power supply at the same time. Nothing seemed wrong the first time around! Still I carefully re-plugged everything. Afterwards I also made sure everything on the 8800GT end was cool.

Beep after beep, still. Crap son of a ..

Now I was beginning to guess which of the two was malfunctioning. Please God let it be the power supply so I can still use the old one and run this juggernaut and play Spore. I then had to leave this messy scene to catch a 30-minute dinner with the missus, and then to meet up a good friend for a chat. During those events my brain was struggling to come up with methods to further pinpoint the problem. Is 500W still not enough for the 8800GT? Not likely, the box says minimum 400W and I have read from forums that some people were able to run it with 350W. Did I break the new card when I pulled it out of the plastic a bit too strong? Is my mobo too old to support this PCI-E 16X channel thing?

After I came home I tried the only alternate solution that I got, which is to assume that the new power supply was a dud and use the old one, everything should run fine and everybody happy, yes? No, I got the beep again. Damnit that means the 8800GT failed, I hate to go back and return stuff like that. Okay fine, no Spore tonight I should probably do some research on this issue so that I didn’t have to look like an ass at the shop explaning what was wrong. Let me just plug the monitor back to the onboard VGA and.. IT STILL FREAKING BEEPS!! CHRIST I BROKE MY OWN HARDWARE NOW I DONT HAVE A WORKING PC!!!

I turned grey, sitting on the floor of my room with pc parts scattered around me. Looks like it’s gonna be a visit to the shop with everything I bought today PLUS my computer, fun!! And I have to wait til Monday for it to open.

I might as well go check out what those long beeps meant, different lengths and frequencies of beeps represents different errors on that mobo. Turns out it could be like 20 things, one of them was RAM. I randomly took out a stick of the 2Gb RAM and started the machine, hoping to hear a different beep. There was no beep, only the smooth spinning of the fans of both the new power supply and the 8800GT, they were running just fine.

What?

Put the RAM back in, beeps came back.

There had been a tiny dustbunny stuck in that particular RAM slot. I pick it up with a toothpick and then blow off the rest of the dust on both RAM slots. Twenty minutes later I am sitting here writing this post. End of story. Clean your pc regularly! I’m off to test out the juggernaut in 3DMark06, later.