Building And Booting The Brand Spanking New

IT’S FINALLY HAPPENED! My computer has been built and is running like a dream except for the occasional hiccup, but that’s the same with any PC.

I went over to the friend who’d be helping me do it at about 11am, where after a trip to the shops, we set out building the beast.

Before we could start building we needed to remove all the old parts and vacuum the case, ready for the new parts.

After cleaning we built the computer as we’d expected to do so, fitting the CPU, RAM and drives to the motherboard, then attaching the Graphics card and Power supply. This is as far as our luck went, the problems started from here on.

We installed windows as we had expected to. We installed it on the new SATA hard disk I’d bought but we had also fitted my old IDE Hard disk as it was still big enough to be of some use. 3 hours after installing XP we discovered that the installer had installed windows on the SATA drive (as we had told it to), but it had seen the IDE drive as the first drive and so had put the boot data on that drive instead of the intended target (not what we wanted). So after we thought we’d sorted everything, we set out having to re-install XP but with the added challenge of having to get it so that it wouldn’t use the IDE drive. We ended up removing the IDE drive, reinstalling XP, then re-formatting the IDE drive from within the XP installer; this meant all the time we’d taken sorting out the computer after installing the OS had been wasted as this meant that we had to wipe the drives and start form scratch.

After getting it installed properly and the drivers installed properly, we put my computer aside as it was getting late and I could do the rest on my own, we also had to see to my mums computer.

The only problems I've had with it were a reluctance to install XP Service pack 3, a couple of graphics problems (but that was my own doing, I'd set it to a setting incompatible with one of my games), and that fact that the front audio ports wouldn’t work without be mucking about with a setting. Luckily they were all easily fixed.

The computer isn’t top-of-the-range, but it’s a damn sight better than the crap you can buy off the shelf for the same amount of money which are lower spec in regards to CPU, RAM and graphics and have vista and a load of manufacturer crap installed on them. As it is now my computer blasts through all of my current games, reaching about 130 frames per second on guildwars at maximum detail; against the 15-32 fps that my old system could manage, and that wasn’t even at full detail. So overall I’m ecstatic with my new system.

Driving to Distraction

My life feels like swings and roundabouts at the moment, I don’t seem to know whether it’ll go my way or not at the moment.

I’ve finally got all the pieces to re-build my PC, I lost count of the cost ages ago, but it all seems to be coming together; all I have to do now is save up enough to pay the person who’ll be guiding me through the process. What a learning curve that’ll be.

I also have my first driving lesson on Saturday; to be honest I’m not sure what to think of it at the moment. I tend to be able to live without items or skills that others seem to think are mandatory, like a mobile for instance – I only have one as I was given it, I seem to be swaying towards the same mind frame with driving. I know it’ll help me a lot more than a mobile ever will and that I'll need it at some point, but, to be totally frank, the prospect of being on the road scares me, as I've had masses of near misses as a pedestrian. Most were the drivers fault rather than mine as they all seem to happen on pelican crossings; but I just can’t shake this feeling that at one point I'll lose concentration and be the cause rather than the victim, and have it turn out a lot worse than a “near-miss”.

The work at school is a bit lighter at the moment, but the subjects are getting more complicated. Maths has a lot more to remember than any subject (I’m also sick of adults who did O-levels, where everything had to be remembered, harping on about how things are easier, I’d like to see them go through all this again, as it certainly doesn’t seem easier). Physics is also both boring and complicated, the Mechanics is boring as I've done it all before and the Waves is complicated as I've just skipped half the questions in a homework as I didn't understand it.

My fatigue is also getting worse, I write my entries at this time of night as I can’t sleep, then because I've been up late I'm tired in school, the lessons where you’re just talked at make this worse, as I dozed off in maths today during Mrs Ball’s explanation. It also happens in Physics and select systems lessons with Mr Finn.

I also seem to be distracted a lot more recently. Be it some discussion that sparks my interest, or just the usual Wednesday afternoon maths degeneration. I think it’s fair to say my concentration is shot to bits.