Oooh, nice innards of computer...AH-CHOO *sniff* excuse me.

I don't know why, but hayfever has been hammering me for the past week. It's like every ragweed, birch, grass and mugwort pollen particle has been attracted to my sinuses. Been clogged up, and feeling out of sorts for days on end now.

Well, in between fits of sneezing yesterday, I managed, with the help of my cousin in Reno, to open up the Gateway desktop PC and managed to get some sort of preliminary diagnosis.



1) The computer does not have any power to it unless the start button is held down continuously.
2) The hard-drive will not start booting regardless of how long the start-button is held down.
3) When the start button is held down; all the fans: case fan, CPU fan, and the power supply fan all operate. When the start button is released, they all stop.
4) There is a green light on the motherboard that is on when the power button is pressed and held down. When it is released, it turns off. The power supply light is lit when the power cord to the back of the case is plugged in.

And of course, NOW it doesn't do anythng at all when the power button is pushed. Sometimes the power light comes on, sometimes the power light stays off. Anyways, yanked out the power switch, ground and hot wires leading to the LEDs and am going to replace all of them at NCIX at some point next week. Evidently, my wife's work doesn't have replacement wires/switches. If that doesn't work, then there could be a short in the power supply cord. Which pretty much means...replace the whole friggin' power supply.



And then now I've gone "STUPID". I'm now having ideas of building my own PC from the ground up. I want to have it be a Core i7 980X which is reputed to have a hyperthreaded-six-core processing unit. The reason behind this is that I'm looking at hyper-processing (on a usual shoot day, I run in excess of over 600 images or more). I've been also looking at going Photoshop CS4 when I get my computer and CS4 was optimized to run with a quad-core system. The reason I've been thinking about building my own machine is because I can't seem to get the stuff that I want with the boxed-package i7 machines available at the stores. I want to be able to pick my own parts and build my machine from the ground up. That way I get a chance to learn how to replace a SATA hard-drive, add more RAM, etc etc.

The faster I process, the sooner I can get on to my next shoot. I hate macro-processing a batch of 600+ photos and sitting there for an hour and a half while CS sits there and churns on a single processor. I'm not a gamer. I used to game, but no longer and I find that I don't miss the games either. But I find that I can use the speed for video/photo editing and it would be a godsend to have that.

Well, I'm going to look into how to build a PC and if I feel like I can manage it, I'll try. If not, I'll get buy with an expandable box system and throw in some upgrades.