| As stated in the comic, the awesome fan hax0r jax sent me a message in facebook shortly after my computer died, saying he had an extra that he was using as a Minecraft server. I actually had several offers for various computer parts from others (thanks guys, you know who you are), but Joshua here offered first, and a full computer at that! A bit of messaging later, and a large, heavily dented, cut-open-by-customs box had arrived. Naturally, the cat decided to "help" me with the box. Or attack the Metroid Joshua taped to it, I'm not sure which. | |
| Pictures unfortunately don't depict it that well, but trust me, it was well and truly banged up. Tons of dents or bent sections of the case, the front cover was pulled off and... yeah, it was just one of those 'shake your head in disbelief' type situations. Customs in their infinite wisdom decided to cut open the box, remove most of the packing, unsurprisingly find nothing illicit (assumingly tearing the shit out of everything in the process), then just... not bother putting any of the packing material inside to keep the computer safe. Thanks guys. | |
| As you can see, the CPU fan and heat sink was torn off, the bottom of the DVD drive either fell, snapped, or was pulled off by Customs, and the video card was no longer in its slot. The clips for the heat sink/fan were broken, so I replaced that. One of the sticks of RAM is also not working, but even with 1 gig of ram, this thing still beats the everloving piss out of my old computer. Said RAM however will eventually be replaced, but I can quite easily work with what I've got for the time being. | |
| However, some swapping needed to be done, since a DVD drive is still kinda useful. Due to the fact that there was only one IDE slot, and bizarrely my 5 1/4" drive, 3.5" drive, and zip drive weren't SATA. I did however cram all of those into there without hooking them up, if not only to fill in the holes in the front of the case. The IDE slot went to the hard drive and DVD drive. I plan to get a second hard drive to once again have a dual-boot system (although Steam is available in Linux now, Audiosurf... and pretty much any other games I have or want to play, are not). Naturally, anything else I get for the computer will be SATA. | |
| And here we have the re-assembled computer in all its glory. I was for a short time contemplating swapping the cases too, however after discovering how much of a pain in the ass it was to try to pull the motherboard out of the old case (and keep track of the million cables plugged into everything from all directions), I decided that the banged up case is good enough. At the bare minimum, it gives it character. I neatened up all the cables, got everything hooked up, and we had a new (to me), working computer that did indeed chew up my old computer and spit it out like it was being paid to do so. | |
| With the computer back in its rightful place (you can probably ignore the giant M16 ammo box down there... that's both empty, and in the process of becoming a geocache container. Or any of the rest of the crap, the computer room doubles as the storage room), I can once again go back to making comic strips, or just... using the computer. I actually came to the conclusion a while ago that DUE to the fact that my old computer was so very, very terrible and dying (I literally was unable to even watch a youtube video... I'd get maybe 3 frames a second. And that wasn't due to the internet speed), I was starting to just drift away from computer use in general. With an actual WORKING computer, I'm sure that trend will be turning itself right the hell around. And I can watch videos, or play games, or actually DO things again! WOOOOOH! Thanks a million again Joshua. You may well have saved Planet Zebeth. | |
