Why life sucks.

In the past two weeks:

1. Got a new motherboard and video card.
2. Installed both and broke Windows.
3. Repared Windows.
4. Finally managed to overclock video card after tons of problems.
5. Broke Windows. Nay, shall I say, Windows broke itself. Crashing and whatnot.
6. Fresh install w/format.
7. Forgot to back up 8+ gigs of Stepmania songs and Oblivion mods. (>.<)
8. Manage to recover almost all of my important Stepmania songs, EXCEPT the ONE that I cared most about getting!
9. Windows works. Yay.
10. Begin working on a case lighting scheme.
11. Fry the controller board of my second HDD with EVERYTHING important on it (backed up from the format and my 30+ gigs of music), due to a combination of me stupidly shorting out my PSU and unknowingly overvolting the HDD.
12. Purchase an identical HDD model to replace the board.
13. HDD arrives next day. Thank you, NCIX Purolator shipping!
14. HDD has a new design of controller board (Thanks, Seagate, for buying Maxtor! /sarcasm) and therefore doesn't work.
15. Send old HDD in for recovery.
16. Hope they don't find my copious porn stash, that has some, shall we say, questionable images in it, that I've never been bothered to delete... (stupid Hentai torrents... grrrrrrrr, but I'm not too worried, there were only a couple pics, and there was 4+ gigs of just regular messed up Hentai shit [mostly yuri].).
17. Sit here listening to the *5* songs that I have on my computer because FrostWire refuses to connect to the network so I can get more.

I'm pissed off. Dumb computers.

The UPS Server Case!

Alright, since my parts STILL aren't in and probably won't be for ANOTHER two days or so, I'll post my current case mod, the UPS case.

Here's a picture of the whole thing:

As you can see, it's a very large (full tower) Pentium 1 server case. The standard ATX mobo looks puny in it!

So what I did is disassemble a UPS (the battery is dead, so it isn't in the picture. It will be at the bottom front) and put the various parts into the case, in essence making an all-in-one server case.

Here's a close-up of the wiring in the case:


Here you can see the transformer (bottom left), the ventilation fan (right above the transformer), the PCB with all the stuff on it (top; don't worry, there's plenty of space between it and the top of the case thanks to spacers!), and the back of the computer PSU (bottom right).

Here's a shot of the front of the case showing the PSU (note that this is from a previous version of the case, without the vent fan, hence the transformer position in the background):


...And here's the back (with the unit on) showing both the power cable (top left, beside the ventilation fan) and the UPS switch (lit up, on the bottom right by the video card):


Now the hard facts:

UPS (Uninterrupted Power Supply, for the uninitiated) maximum power: 450W
Computer PSU (Power SUpply) maximum power draw: 350W
Computer specs: AMD Athlon 2200+ @1.8GHz, 512 MB DDR RAM, 1x 40 GB HDD, 1x 8 GB HDD, whatever video card I can find (it's a server).
Additional future mods: Possibly adding a wall socket output for a monitor.

Still not here!

My parts are a bit late, so I havn't gotten them yet. Since I work for the next two days, I won't be able to do anything until Friday anyways. C'ya then!

...and it begins.

Well, hopefully my card and board come in tommorow, or at the latest Tuesday. Then the fun can start!

But first, why I'm doing this blog.

I love overclocking, tweaking, hacking, etc. It's fun, and for a while I've wondered, maybe it would be fun to just record all of my computer antics for the world (read: no one :P) to see. So, the result of that wondering, is this blog.

My setup right NOW is:

AMD Athlon 64 3500 at stock clocks (2000 MHz)
MSI K8T-Neo2 (AGP) at stock clocks (200 MHz FSB)
1 GB OCz Platinum low-latency RAM at stock clocks (200 MHz)
ATi Radeon 9200 AGP (My x850 just died on Friday, so with the new card comes a perfect time to start!)
Onboard sound and the like.

What I ordered:

ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe Crossfire
ATi Radeon x1950 XTX PCI-e