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Assembling a new all-eggs-in-one-basket computer to replace a couple of home servers I have at the moment...

Step 1. Spend ages figuring out the most cost efficient, fast and stable hardware, order it and wait for it to be delivered
Step 2. Clear up delivery day schedule to spend the day assembling and configuring the machine
Step 3. Delivery arrives, notice that the 'new' motherboard is in fact a refurb (the hand-written 'driver cd' CDR is the main giveaway). Figure the day is already assigned for assembly so decide to give it a go and hope for the best.
Step 4. Assemble the bare minimum (cpu+ram+motherboard+psu) using a motherboard test rig (small switches and LEDs instead of plugging in to a full case).
Step 5. Power on. No screen appears, 5-10 seconds pass and then a motherboard component ignites, sending a nice wisp of stinky smoke into the room.

Time to return the motherboard, hope the CPU and RAM were not damaged and now I get to play the 4-6 week duration return system. Yay dabs.com!

Still, when it is finished it will have 10.8TB of usable space over 2 RAID5 arrays and a quad core processor to run stats and log crunching so not all bad.

Anyone else had fun with computers lately?

Holy crap that's a lot of disk space.

Mostly people around me have the trouble and I avoid people with PC trouble at all costs, I used to man a helpdesk and I've learned that people never ever listen. Not even when the solution is so obvious.

I feel your pain... I built a computer for a friend once. I have a tendency to name the systems at the time or shortly around the build dependant on how the build went. My last box for example was Blue Rain, after an Ex who was a beyotch. My current one is Blue Aerie... after my last girlfriend who is probably the greatest person in the world.

Then there was Murphy...

Murphy just has not been right since day one. The mother board wuld only go to the post screen or gove options to get to the bios if there was not a keyboard plygged in at start up. I calleed Asus up and told them what was going on. The first thing they had me do was flash the bois. Ok... didnt work. Next they sent out a new Bios chip for me to install. That didnt work either. Next they had me RMA the whole MoBo... A few weeks later it comes bake. Still will not show post screen nor allow entry to the bois if a keyboard is plugged in. I called them back again and they pretty much said "yeah that's great" which has made me not consided Asus parts from there on out.

Next was getting Windows to install. Said frined got a copy of windows from one of his friends. It is a legit copy from a mass license distrobution. Might not be entirely the intended purpose of the use of the license but better than pirating one. It would get to about 75 percent done and just stop. I tried it 5 times. Every time... it would get to the same point and then stop. I finally tried something that someone else recomended and used my disc but entered the seriel from the other one and it finally worked.

Got it up and running finally and then spontaniously the CPU fan Dies. Brand New CPU fan and it dies. Fine... trip out to Frys and that problem was solved.

6 months Later Murphy somehow managed to lose the task manager in Windows... I tried doing a repair install first but that had no effect. Format and Reinstall later and that was fixed... keep in mind that all the original issues still had to be worked around.

I think there have been a few other issues besodes... but it got to a point for a while where I started screening calls from that friend to find out if they were computer related.

I really hated Murphy... and I think he finally died.

I'm looking up upgrading my Dual core processor with a quad core in the near future, buying another 180gigs of hard drive space, and upgrading my graphics card. Any tips on best prices with all your recent research?

I got a new gaming rig earlier in the year. Nice dual-core system w/ 8Gb Ram (necessitating running Vista - XP doesn't have a 64-bit version, and running linux defeats the purpose of having a gaming machine).

When I got it, half the drivers on it were wrong. And, every so often, the entire system just freezes entirely. Still haven't diagnosed that issue. System logs are useless, no clues there, I've started running without a screen saver and Task Manager open, sorted by CPU usage, hoping to catch whatever runaway process might be causing it.

Just ordered a Toshiba netbook though, which should allow me to do some work away from my desk.

My department does a lot of video processing and we need to store huge amounts of data and shift it around the network quickly to move it to different stations for editing, subtitling and transcoding.

Recently we were having very slow network speeds and complained to the network department.

They worked out the stats and showed us a graph with Y labelled in kiloIOPS (might have been kilo IOPS or mega or something)

This stands for Input/Output Operations per Second and it's a measure of how much network you are using in terms of writing to or reading from the main network storage.

Anyway, the normal company working level (400 staff) is between 400 and 800 kIOPS. My department was pumping out 2,400! I only have five staff including me.

We've got about 22TB of local storage on various RAIDs and another 5TB online.