So remember how I bought that new video card for Christmas, and that I needed to upgrade the power supply unit? Well, my video card, the wonderful Radeon HD EAH4830, requires at least 400 watts. I bought a 730w watt unit. Guess what happened? It pulled an Emperor Palpatine on my computer, straight, "UNLIMITED POWAAAAA!" and blew out the onboard LAN and audio bits for my motherboard.

That was not cool.

So rather than do nothing without a computer and save up for buying a pre-built machine, I started buying new parts every other week, as my paycheck arrived. I ordered a very nice mid-range motherboard, an ASUS P5Q PRO, a full-size mobo. It arrives dead on arrival. So I send it back, get a replacement. I was very nearly going to call it dead as well, when my brother and I found, much to our surprise, that this motherboard simply REFUSES, like a rampant four-year old child throwing a tantrum, to boot. Not even a damned test beep. Nothing. NOTHING. By some miraculous twist, my brother stood it up, and ta-da! It boots fine.

There is a minor issue with it: It doesn't appreciate having mixed sets of RAM. So instead of running two 512 sticks and a 2 gig stick for 3 gigs, I'm only running the 2 gig stick. Oh well.

Now, when I bought the first motherboard, I realized it was a full-size, and that my tower was a mid. For those of you not in the know, that's like wearing a size 42 pair of jeans, and trying to squeeze into 18's. Not happening. Don't even bother trying. Except in this case, you'd be trying to cram something made of delicate electronic parts, into a steel frame. Yeah ... no.

So, I have this partially working system, but no tower. A friend of mine offered to let me use an ANCIENT tower of his, from the Windows 95 era. Needless to say, new tech and old tech doesn't work too well. We literally butchered that tower's frame just to make everything fit. It was going to be dubbed Frankentowah. It was fugly.

I've since ordered a new tower, and put everything in it. I'll get a picture, I promise, but this thing is a BEAST. It doesn't even fit inside the sectional on my desk. It barely even fits UNDER the desk. It's nearly 3 feet tall. It has a 250mm fan on it's side for chrissakes. Not to mention 4 other fans. It's wicked. And runs COLD. Like, 29 degrees Celsius, cold. And yes, it is air-cooled. The hottest I have seen it reach in temperature was 41 Celsius, and even that is no joke.

Unfortunately, I lost a LOT of my work with Terragen (i.e. all of it). Nearly 50 gigs of data vanished and corrupted on the DVDs I had it backed up on. Seems I need to get a new burner as well. So what this means is starting fresh for me. I still have Photoshop 2 and Terragen, at least, but it'll be a long road back to the point I was at. There's even a new contest that started up with that I'm working on getting a couple submissions into. But in the meantime, I'm also getting back into the swing of things with Terragen.

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Edit: dA is apparently anal now about links, either that or I've suddenly become a raging idiot. Can someone please give me the syntax they're using for image linking? Thanks.