Took the war machine in to Frank Gentile Subaru for its 15,000-mile checkup with the check-engine light on first thing this morning. The good news-they got the scheduled work done nice and quick. The bad-they didn’t have the part to cure the light (an air-fuel mixture sensor). The ugly-$225 plunked down. So, they sent me on my way until they could get the part from the dealer not 5 minutes from my house. I got that out of the way this afternoon and came back home to find my new memory waiting.
That’s when things got REAL ugly. First, old reliable wouldn’t boot up with the new memory, so I put the old back in. At first it refused to boot up with that as well; then it did boot up only without the USB ports working (which is a bad thing because I have a USB keyboard/mouse combo). Then, right after that started working again, poof! I went down to Milwaukee PC to pick up a new power supply (and a new DVD writer; when I finally put the old one I got as a gift in, it didn’t work), only to find that my bank didn’t like the idea of putting that on my debit card. I went and got some boku cash from the bank, then got the bright idea of doing a full upgrade to the Athlon64/PCI-E standard (since the new memory is DDR instead of DDR2, I’m sort of “stuck” in the AMD camp). Being a gamer at heart, I went a “bit” overboard on the video card at Best Buy (where I also picked up my new DVD writer, which also does laser etching :-), then went back to Milwaukee PC to pick up the board (one of the original SLIs) and a “slow” 3200+ processor, along with my new modular power supply (no excess power cords).
I finally got home about 7, and started the long process (because I can’t really handle those tiny screws, not because the rest of it is hard) of rebuilding. I was actrually surprised when WIndows booted up instead of dumping me into reinstallation hell, though I did have to reactivate both Windows and Office. After a few reboots as I updated the drivers, I’m finally rocking again, but now I’m wiped out.
