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stormdogI started the morning with a lovely breakfast and short wander through a few stores in Evanston with my dearly-loved partner Danae. This was one of the best weekends I've had in a long time!
My afternoon, though, has been spent building my new computer. There have been issues. Of course there have; there are always issues.
My brother got a copy of Windows 8 via his computer science program at school. I installed and hated it from the moment I logged in. The UI made me think of every moment of frustration and annoyance I've ever had with touch-screen devices. But I figured I'd get used to it and dug in to software updates and driver installs. Then it started locking up less than a minute after completing it's boot to Windows. I figured that when I was having trouble seating the heat sink/fan comb on the CPU, I must have picked it up and put it down too many times and messed up the thermal transfer paste. The temperature at idle seemed pretty high.
I took it apart, cleaned it with alcohol and a wipe, applied new paste, and tried again. Temperature was a *little* lower, but it was still locking up. Then it occurred to me that if it was really temperature, it would have been locking up during the Windows install. Instead, it only started doing it after I installed all the drivers that came on the DVD with the motherboard. Rather than try to uninstall things in an unfamiliar OS that only gave me a minute or so before crashing, I figured it was time to reinstall the OS. And since I was reinstalling the OS, I got out my Windows 7 media, because no. No Windows 8.
That went quite well for a while. The machine was stable through the install and driver installations. Then my much beloved, frequently used, rather expensive Kinesis Advantage started freaking out. Suddenly the BIOS would not recognize it, and I couldn't use it to log into Windows. All the LEDs were on solid and nothing would see it. It turns out that this is a known issue. On computers with Windows 7 (And not on any other OS!) that have a USB3 controller, even if there are also USB 2 controllers, the Kinesis Advantage fails to work. Kinesis has a cable adapter that will resolve the issue, but it costs $20 for keyboards that are still under warranty. Since mine was bought for me by work back when I was still in IT, I wonder if mine will be significantly more expensive. I emailed them to ask.
I had just posted in Facebook about how the machine was totally stable under Windows 7 when it started failing the boot process. I could only get to Windows in safe mode. I had just updated the BIOS, so clearly that was related. I was worried at first that the process had failed, but everything had looked smooth. I figured something must have changed enough to break Windows' brain and I'd just have to reinstall the OS. Again. As I was doing so, I was presented with the usual dialogue asking me where to install to. There were two hard drives available. I stopped and looked at the screen. That wasn't right!
I realized that what had happened is that my BIOS update broke my RAID-1 mirror which, of course, was managed by the BIOS. There really ought to be a warning about that; it could cause a big problem! So I rebuilt the mirror, but to no avail; it still failed to boot. So my most recent step has been deleting the logical partitions, building a new RAID-1 mirror from scratch, and reinstalling Windows 7.
And it's going pretty well! So far....
My afternoon, though, has been spent building my new computer. There have been issues. Of course there have; there are always issues.
My brother got a copy of Windows 8 via his computer science program at school. I installed and hated it from the moment I logged in. The UI made me think of every moment of frustration and annoyance I've ever had with touch-screen devices. But I figured I'd get used to it and dug in to software updates and driver installs. Then it started locking up less than a minute after completing it's boot to Windows. I figured that when I was having trouble seating the heat sink/fan comb on the CPU, I must have picked it up and put it down too many times and messed up the thermal transfer paste. The temperature at idle seemed pretty high.
I took it apart, cleaned it with alcohol and a wipe, applied new paste, and tried again. Temperature was a *little* lower, but it was still locking up. Then it occurred to me that if it was really temperature, it would have been locking up during the Windows install. Instead, it only started doing it after I installed all the drivers that came on the DVD with the motherboard. Rather than try to uninstall things in an unfamiliar OS that only gave me a minute or so before crashing, I figured it was time to reinstall the OS. And since I was reinstalling the OS, I got out my Windows 7 media, because no. No Windows 8.
That went quite well for a while. The machine was stable through the install and driver installations. Then my much beloved, frequently used, rather expensive Kinesis Advantage started freaking out. Suddenly the BIOS would not recognize it, and I couldn't use it to log into Windows. All the LEDs were on solid and nothing would see it. It turns out that this is a known issue. On computers with Windows 7 (And not on any other OS!) that have a USB3 controller, even if there are also USB 2 controllers, the Kinesis Advantage fails to work. Kinesis has a cable adapter that will resolve the issue, but it costs $20 for keyboards that are still under warranty. Since mine was bought for me by work back when I was still in IT, I wonder if mine will be significantly more expensive. I emailed them to ask.
I had just posted in Facebook about how the machine was totally stable under Windows 7 when it started failing the boot process. I could only get to Windows in safe mode. I had just updated the BIOS, so clearly that was related. I was worried at first that the process had failed, but everything had looked smooth. I figured something must have changed enough to break Windows' brain and I'd just have to reinstall the OS. Again. As I was doing so, I was presented with the usual dialogue asking me where to install to. There were two hard drives available. I stopped and looked at the screen. That wasn't right!
I realized that what had happened is that my BIOS update broke my RAID-1 mirror which, of course, was managed by the BIOS. There really ought to be a warning about that; it could cause a big problem! So I rebuilt the mirror, but to no avail; it still failed to boot. So my most recent step has been deleting the logical partitions, building a new RAID-1 mirror from scratch, and reinstalling Windows 7.
And it's going pretty well! So far....
