Why do I do it?

It started innocently enough… ah, crap, that’s how I began that other post.

Okay… here’s the deal. I’m weak. My weakness is gadgets, particularly computers. You know this if you’ve been reading this site for any length of time. It is rare that I make it through a given six month period without doing *something* that involves partly or completely gutting one or more computers.

Of course I’m leading up to the fact that I’m ripping the innards from my PCs once again. This time I can hardly make a cogent excuse for my behavior. My main gaming PC is the subject of my latest reconstruction and, as I noted in that post you’ll find at the link above, it started with a new video card. The ATI 3870 x2 is a great card, by all accounts, but it isn’t working out so well with my AMD 64 x2 processor and Asus M2R32 motherboard.

The first and most “urgent” cause for this uncalled for reconstruction: the new video card didn’t make EverQuest 2 faster. I really think this is an EverQuest 2 problem: everything I’ve read tells me this. Yet I’m upgrading even more of my computer. I told you I didn’t have a good excuse for this… but that doesn’t stop me from proceeding. My theory of the moment is that getting off the AMD platform and onto Intel will remove one potential source of difficulty. Plus moving from a dual core to a quad core configuration can’t hurt, right?

The second reason… my current PC build, which I assembled in October of 2006, has given me difficulty pretty much right from the start. I still can’t put the system into standby mode without a 50/50 chance of utterly and completely corrupting the hard drive. I’ve had strange problems with the system failing periodically to boot. Then yesterday I went to install new Catalyst drivers for my video card, and it crashed on start up forcing me to revert to a previous config.

This isn’t necessarily the fault of the configuration . But Asus more or less stopped updating the drivers for the M2R32 in January of 2007: several of their “latest” drivers for Vista are still dated prior to the official release of Vista. This makes me suspicious that some or even all of the problems I am experiencing are a result of this motherboard being a bit of a “Vista orphan”.

All of this is an excuse to burn up more money and buy more shiny things that go “beep!” I bought a giant heat sink! And a motherboard designed for over-clocking! Wheee!

And yes, I’ll write a more complete article regarding the build I’m assembling once I get the pieces put together…