Two weeks ago, my power supply packed up – it was working fine, I left the room for an hour, and the PC was off and refused to turn back on

Luckily the PSU was still under warranty, so hopefully I should receive a repaired/replaced PSU some time soon after RMAing it last week.

On Friday of last week though, my Graphics Card died! This was also still under warranty, so I RMA’d it today to Scan, who will hopefully send me a replacement by the end of the week.

They say bad things come in threes, so I’m waiting for something else to stop working now – unless the third thing was Royal Mail’s overly-excessive (and seemingly random) pricing. £14 to send a PSU with very little insurance, but only £6 to send a graphics card with up to £500 insurance! WTF!

I’ve been using my Laptop with a full-size keyboard, my normal and my monitor mouse plugged in, so I can at least keep more-or-less up-to-date with things (email, RSS feeds etc), but all of the stuff I was working on is on my PC – so all my VB, PHP and C# development has come to a complete stop until the PC is revived.

I found this great guide which helps create your own local mirror Fedora Core YUM repositories – great if you have several local computers running Fedora, as I do.

I’m mirroring (locally only though, not publicly) the “Core” and “Updates” repo’s – I looked into doing the “Extras” repo too, but that’s nearly 10GB of files! That will have to wait for bigger hard disks… :P

So far I’ve got my laptop and my local Linux server using my local repo, and I’ll set my main pc to use it once I’ve installed Linux on it.

I also installed lighttpd on my local server, running on an alternate port, which should make installing large software packages over the LAN that little bit faster than if I used Apache 2, which runs on the default port. I’d switch to lighttpd as the main web server, but I couldn’t get PHP working well with it the last time I tried.

I’ve bought myself a new case for my computer, as well as a replacement heat sink for the noisy motherboard fan and a replacement cooler for the graphics card too. Here are some some pretty pictures

(Thanks to some random website for the first pic; I still haven’t taken the protective plastic coating off the metal as I will be moving where the PC is in a week or two and I don’t want it scratched :P)

I ordered a new motherboard, cpu and graphics card last week, (and a new wireless router), which arrived yesterday afternoon. After spending several long hours trying to configure my new router to do what I needed it to do, I gave up. As it happens, it can’t do what I want until I upgrade the firmware of my other router that I want to link it to, and I can’t do that until Draytek release a new Beta. :P

After that I spent another hour checking I had backed everything up, burnt my custom XP Pro install disk (which didn’t actually work, but now’s not the time…), and turned the PC off. After wrestling for about 10 minutes with all the various cables, screws and components I managed to get the old CPU, graphics card and motherboard out. Another 20 minutes later, the new stuff was in and I was nearly ready to boot. However, I did take the time to read the manual before all of this :P
Now, after the install, a little tweaking of windows and updating of motherborad firmware the system is running fine. I got a massive 6520 points in 3DMark05 – This doesn’t sound like much but don’t let it fool you

So I now have a kick-ass gaming PC that can do anything I want (and a lot more), and it actually looks good, plays good, and sounds good (in other words, it doesn’t sound like a hoover anymore! :D)

I’ve skinned Windows this time too, and made a new custom wallpaper:

And for those who are really interested, here are the specifications of what I bought:

• GigaByte Geforce 7800GT
• Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe
• AMD Athlon 64 3000+

And what I already had:

• Hiper Type-R 580W
• Maxtor DiamondMax Plus9 80GB SATA
• Maxtor DiamondMax Plus10 160GB SATA
• NEC DVD±RW Dual Layer
• GigaByte 3DCooler Ultra

Anyone interested in where I got all this from, or where they can buy PC components from should visit Scan Computers

- Fr3d