This has been a fairly bad week for me. One thing seemed to pile on to another in typical avalanche fashion. One of the worst bits was Monday, when Blade died. I'm fairly certain a nasty static shock through the USB port is what did it.

Blade is the system that started as a pure gaming rig, back in January 2005, and quickly became my full-time Linux do-everything box. It was my first 'new' build, all the others had been with scavenged parts. It seems cheesy, but tonight I'm dismantling her and I feel pretty sad, actually. This computer went through 3 power supplies, but otherwise had no mechanical issues. I ended up adding 2 hard drives to have almost a Terabyte of storage on there, an extra 2GB of RAM, a 'new' (at the time) GeForce 6800XT, and logged untold thousands of hours of gaming on her. LAN parties too numerous to count, dozens (hundreds including stuff for school) of software projects, and just about all my Walraven programming was done from her keyboard. Her uptime (aside from a summer in storage while I was out of the country) was probably up around 95%, not 5 9's but everything I ever asked for. Honestly, it was to the point where when I finally graduated and got a place with an office separate from my bedroom I'd wake up and wonder why she was off (as I couldn't see the running-lights). Now she's sitting in pieces on my floor as I part out what's good, and what's bad.

Living for another build:

  • All the small bits: Screws, Jumpers, CMOS battery, etc.
  • Case... she's served me well.
  • Hard Drives, no data corruption that I know of.
  • CD-ROM, still good but ordered a new one anyhow to get SATA.
  • Peripherals, I may have damaged my USB mouse, but I think the others still work.
  • RAM, its still good, and decent stuff too!
  • Video card will definitely find a new home, she's still great!
  • Heat sink, SPU had a nice heatsink, might as well keep that.

Bound for the scrap heap:

  • PSU. When I plug a power cord in I get big blue sparks off the back power switch.
  • Motherboard, although she won't hit the trash yet. I'm thinking of making a display for it.
  • CPU. I don't have a spare board to test and see if its still good. If I can nab one off a friend I'll test, but otherwise this is gone.

What I ordered:

  • Motherboard: obviously need a new one of these.
  • RAM, my old stuff is DDR, need to get at least DDR2 for a new motherboard.
  • CPU, again an old form factor just can't be found on modern boards.
  • CD-ROM, I need a SATA CD-ROM as the new mobo only has one IDE slot and I have two IDE drives (yes, still).
  • PSU, nice new 630W with a good long warranty!

The above should get me back up and running nicely, though in the future I'll be picking up a PCI-E video card (my old ones are all AGP) so I can run monitors dual-head. Have a nice 9800GT (my old card's big brother, XFS) picked out for early May, I think. This is money I did not want to have to spend now, so the optional pieces are waiting. I think that once I get the system up and running I'm going to do a nice reformat to clean up all the drives (begs the question of where I'll keep the data) and start from scratch. I'll consider it a new build, and let the name 'Blade' go to rest.

With all that said, I'll go back to dealing with the remains. If anyone knows of fun ways to display a motherboard, let me know. I want to honor this build somehow.

Good night, friend.

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