the pc

After a long and storied weekend, my desktop is FINALLY UP and running. It was exhilarating, miserable, enlightening, heartstopping, nerve-wracking and finally... ... rewarding.

I actually went ape-shit mad crazy a couple of times on Monday. (I took leave on Monday thanks to a world cup final gathering that never occurred.)

It started on Saturday morning. I arrived at the first of many such visits to Sim Lim Square at 1035am.

The first thing that fucked up wasnt exactly my fault - it was zs. He called at around that time - he had JUST woken up. Mother-fuck.

So i strolled around Sim Lim for almost an hour, watching stores open and picking up some pricelists and had breakfast.

Zs FINALLY arrived 1130am.

After a quick look through my lists, he discarded them all. "Nahz, we go to this other shop - PC Themes." I had never heard of it before - but fine, i'd give it a shot.

We strolled past Fuwell - the biggest one of them all in Sim Lim. I glanced at Bell systems. I passed by Bliss and Bizgram. All the others.

Zs led me to the back row of shops - ones where the corridors look like you'd find arabic beggars and arabic music would be playing with their droned out wail/moan melodies. Think gladiator as Maximus is about to die - that kind of moaning/wailing song.

PC themes turned out to be a small shop. But like the Intel Processors - it's small, but powerful - walls were completely fully stocked with Graphics cards and motherboards and RAM modules hung frm hooks like grapes on the vine.

The guy was nice - he wrote down all that i wanted and then some - and we had to throw out a few due to compatibility issues and availability of stock. No matter. Either way, i got what I wanted, with discounts to boot.

Here's what I got from PC Themes:

1) MSI 870A-G54 Motherboard

2) AMD Phenom II X4-965 Black Edition Processor

3) Sapphire Radeon 5850 Vapor-X 1GB-DDR5 Graphics card

4) 4GB Team Elite Dual Channel RAM module kit 1600MHz

5) Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB HDD 7200RPM/32MB

6) 3 Xigmatek cooler fans

7) Xigmatek DarkKnight S1283W CPU cooler fan/heatsink

8) Seasonic 650W PSU

9) Cooler Master Elite 430 Black Chasis

The total set me back by about SGD1800++. Which was surprising. I was expecting abt 1900 to almost 2k on this stuff. We bought, paid and left the stuff there.

The only thing left was the Monitor, Keyboard and Speakers.

In the end, after much patrolling and price watching, we walked into Fuwell and bought an LG 23.5" LED monitor, Altec-Lansing speakers and the Logitech Illuminated Keyboard.

Carrying all this shit was extremely gratifying. People stopped to stare at the amount of stuff we were dragging from lift to taxi stand.

My apartment in Balestier (which is no where NEAR Whampoa), is deviously close to Sim Lim square, so we were back at my place in a matter of 10min tops.

Suddenly, my room filled up. No place for anything. Had to move stuff out. Tennis bag - out. Duffel bag - out. Chairs - out.

First thing we did was setup the power supply. Then the fans. Then we set the CPU on the motherboard, plus the RAM. Then we tried to mount the motherboard.

OOOOPS.

Fans are blocking the mother board. Shit.

Removed the fans. Installed the motherboard. And with GREAT PAIN too i might add.

I should've taken pictures. The finished product doesnt do justice to the effort involved.

The screws for the motherboard were tucked away on a nearly unreachable corner of the board - you needed baby hands to reach there. Thankfully, we managed to screw it on using a sideways test-pen. Lol... motherboard "secure".

The rest of it, went QUITE smoothly, fans, cpu cooler, graphics card, all set.

Then we realized that we were lacking a SATA cable... UGH. Means we had to go all the way down to Sim Lim AGAIN, at around 5pm plus to get a DAMN cable. Oh well. Had dinner on the way back... But that was the last speedbump on the hardware side.

Side note: Cable management is a bitch. Network specialists who specialize in cable management really do earn every single cent.

When zs unwrapped the Illuminated keyboard... we were like - WOW.

Of all the parts that i'd bought, turns out the illuminated keyboard was the most impressive. An ultra thin design, with transparent plastic surrounding it, with a very stylish button design.

Excellent.

The LED LCD screen too was QUITE a beauty. For one - it was epic thin, and it was LIGHT.

Yeah... think my eyes jizzed for a second when i saw it.

Hardware was done. And the nightmare was JUST beginning.

PART 2 coming soon!