Graphically speaking....

The SUL (Secret Underground Lair) has been in a bit of turmoil. This past year, in the space of a month, two of my computers have died. In your world, perhaps, this might not be a disaster. Then again, in your world, you might be off to the Apple Store, weeping inconsolably. If the latter is you, this blog is not for you.

So, a PC died several months ago. No biggie-- I put a spare in as a replacement (note to Apple fans: how many of you have 2-3 in spares?)

Unfortunately, my spare died as well.

To be honest, it didn't really die- it just lost internet connectivity.  So. I was living off of my laptop, and Mr. T. and I have decided we're going to build a new desktop. For me.

I started writing this several months ago, and not long after that, my laptop battery gave in. Not a big deal- just another kick in the shins.

In the interim, I pulled another PC out and swapped out the hard drive. In short order, it, too, gave up. Mind you, both of these desktops were originally XP boxes which had been upgraded to Win7; that should give a hint as to their age.

Fast forward several months and I am running on Great White, a massive box with a tiny non-Ryzen AMD mobo. How tiny is the mobo? Well, the case is so large and the mobo is so tiny that the front case usb cable does not reach the usb header on the mobo. The specs of the board unsurprisingly are fairly underwhelming, as one might expect: 16GB (2 sticks) of DDR3, for starters- and this is maxed out.. Well, it does have a 550 watt 80+ EVGA platinum certified modular PSU, 120GB flash boot drive, 2TB internal HDD (with room for five more HDD's) and a 5 channel fan controller. Other than that, 3 external USB HDD's and... well, the graphics are on the CPU (AMD APU). On the bright side, the APU graphics are much better than I experienced on the previous APU-supported mobo.

Fast forward....

So, I was on amazon.com Wednesday and saw a graphics card that seemed pretty decent for the price. I mentioned it to Mr.T, and he was at first unimpressed. After a few cups of tea, though, it looked like a better deal, and then he looked into some cards. Now, truth be told, I do not absolutely need a graphics card right now, but the graphics card will probably be the next upgrade to this system as it is the only other stand-alone component which can be added before upgrading to a Ryzen.

Interestingly enough, it's now the wee hours of Tuesday morning and I'm *finally* getting around to finishing this. Among other things, I got some work done on 42 (in case you are new to this blog or have forgotten, 42 is my personal database project). Progress has been predictably slow, as my keyboarding skills are not really skills; I think I'd say I'm more familiar with a keyboard than skilled. J and I got new keyboards in November, and I'm loving my new mechanical keyboard. Cherry MX blue switches are absolutely to wonderful to type on, and for some reason I find myself making fewer mistakes on this keyboard.

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you  don't have to.

Seven

Back in the early Eighties, there was a somewhat local band I liked called the Lamont Cranston Band. They played a really nice rock-blues fusion, and had some regional hits, but never went on to the big time. One of the more interesting songs from their Upper Mississippi Shakedown LP was something of a novelty called "Seven". In this tune, the singer laments that seven used to be his lucky number, but now everything associated with seven was bad.

Its not really that way with me. I don't believe in "lucky" numbers. If you would ask, I would tell you that my favorite numbers are five and four (in that order)- not that it means anything.

But... seven is a fairly special number for me, as far as this blog goes: its like the ceiling, a barrier to be broken through. With the hours and times that I work, I've found that getting more that seven blogs per month is challenging. And, when those times hit when I've got absolutely nothing in the idea tank, well... I really have nothing.

Today, though... today is a first: I literally just finished the post Drivers, and immediately started this one. As I was waking up this afternoon after a longer than expected Friday night at work, I was thinking about finishing and publishing the previously mentioned blog when it occurred to me that on most months if I publish seven blogs that's quite an achievement. And Drivers is #7 for the month of March, 2014. So , this has the potential of being #8.

                                                       ******WE*INTERRUPT*THIS*BLOG*FOR*AN IMPORTANT*ANNOUNCEMENT******

Up. And. Running. 5.30.14 (30.5.14)

It took nearly a month, but Jennifer's new rig is operational and has been deployed! The machine was complete around a month ago, but then I decided to install an additional top mounted cooling fan. We had the box open today, and I casually mentioned to Mr. T that I had two 120mm fans, so he said we might as well use both, so we side mounted the second one (the blue ones are the ones we installed today). Windows 7 is mounted on an SSD- it boots incredibly quickly.

The only real issue I had was getting the PC online; I get a pass on this, though, because its actually the very first PC I've built from the ground up. We were watching a few episodes of the Big Bang Theory and having some incredible turkey that Jennifer had baked. I think we watched three episodes before the answer came to me: I had not installed the drivers from the motherboard utilities CD. Once I did that, we were good to go. I discovered an interesting quirk about this PC: the two front panel mounted USB ports are only for I/O... this is something new. Mr. T and I had prepared for taking the PC online for the first time by downloading some of our favorite utilities (Avast, CCleaner and Defraggler) onto a USB stick.Strangely, though, the PC did not acknowledge the existence of the stick. Odd, as I had the transceiver for the mouse in the next port over. I pulled the stick out, and swapped places with the transceiver. Mouse worked fine, but not the stick.  Oh, well, on to Plan B- I went to each site and downloaded the software. Suspecting a possible issue with the drive, I plugged it into a top mounted USB port, and there it was! So the rule for this PC is: Front for I/O, top for data.

After the Chrome installation (this is the standard 1st download here at the SUL), I downloaded the Amazon Player. If you purchase music on Amazon, you really owe it to yourself to download the player, as most music purchased on Amazon becomes part of your Amazon personal cloud. So, even though I hadn't loaded my personal music library to Windows Media Player, I had access to a few hundred songs. I fired up Axe's Rock 'N' Roll Party In The Streets and then Night's Hot Summer Nights- classic late 70's rock which are probably unfamiliar to many. I played these two tracks as I downloaded the Steam client.

I think that's all for now. No data news or updates today, but I should have some speeds and feeds in the next blog or so.

Until them. I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.