Building a PC, Part II

To whom it may concern.

The new machine and the Kill-A-Watt picture reminded me of an odd problem I ran into a couple of months ago after building my latest box.

It had been running great for a few weeks when I got my Kill-A-Watt meter and tested the hardware with it. Well, over the course of the next few weeks my new machine started showing “An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\DR0 during a paging operation” warnings intermittently and the machine would freeze up for 30 seconds at a time. After some unsuccessful troubleshooting, I realized I still had the Kill-A-Watt in the wall as it was out of sight. Removed the meter and the errors stopped. Fortunately, no damage done.

Lesson learned. Don’t leave the meter in the wall too long for appliances and hardware you like.

Was the foldable keyboard used just to get it up and running, or is that the final configuration? I think one of those would quickly drive me insane if I had to use it for development.

The foldable keyboard is a utility keyboard I keep around for “emergency” use… building systems and so forth. I keep it folded up and stowed out of the way normally.

You’re right, it’s an absolutely terrible typing experience. But it’s handy in a pinch!

WHOA I just noticed a critical error in your post! You mention you’re going to install an OS and then installed Windows! WHOOPS! Then you made another error, you said it was ‘reasonably stable’!

Haha.

Really though, I hope you’re wiping that thing before you give it to your friend.

“when I want to boot from a CD I will use the BIOS boot menu (F12 on mine).”

I HATE having to play whack-a-mole to try and boot from the CD.

“The foldable keyboard is a utility keyboard I keep around for “emergency” use”

I have an earlier version of that keyboard. It works great out in my shop which also houses a table saw.

Any chance you could use your own hosting to host the images from this article? ALL of the popular image hosting sites are blocked by websense as personal storage/data transfer or some other BS. It makes it hard to read a picture-heavy article from work.

Aww, you didn’t get approval from the Feline Inspection Board this time. :wink: I can’t believe how much system-testing equipment you have around for someone who doesn’t do it all the time.

Is it me or was there some gigs missing from the windows experience index for RAM and HD?

@Araemo
His amazon S3 hosting is blocked as a ‘personal storage/data transfer’ server? This type of set up is pretty common… do you have this issue with a lot of websites?

Jeff, great article; you make me want a new computer… again. Actually you make me want several new computers haha. One for use as a media center, one as a file server/sandbox, and one for dev. Anyway I’m really looking forward to the overclocking portion :wink:

Jim

The BIOS screen indicates the DVD drive is on secondary slave. Wouldn’t it be better for it to be the master? I’m sure the old bugs optical drives used to have when set up as the slave have long since been resolved, but does this arrangement affect performance? Maybe not, since there is no master device on the bus?

Want to know why the memory score is lower?
Roddy, says it based on speed, not size. He’s right.

When you increase the number of buses that have to connect to cache, and/or increase the cache size, you increase the number of transistors a signal has to go through to get to the end.

In short, a equally clocked memory bus for a dual versus quad, will always have the quad disadvantaged by latency. It’s a very small amount, but per transaction it’s not that small of a percentage. It’s there.

Nikolai: “Well, you CAN install an OS without an optical drive. It just wouldn’t be any of Microsoft’s systems…”

While most people install Windows from a disc, it can also be installed from a flash drive or over the network:
http://kurtsh.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!DA410C7F7E038D!1665.entry
http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsVista/en/library/9e197135-6711-4c20-bfad-fc80fc2151301033.mspx?mfr=true

Another good burn in utility: Memtest86+. Runs a variety of patterns designed to detect bad memory, and report any failures it finds.

http://www.memtest.org/

You don’t even need an OS installed to run it, so it’s usually the first test I run.

annoying inconsistency I noticed with this post; you show a Vista Home Premium retail box in one of the photos but the Vista Experience summary says it’s running Vista Ultimate

Ben,
Next time take the time to read the article.

Great stuff, this. Where can I get me one of these Mark I fingers you describe? grin Seriously, can you post the cost breakout of the rig you’re building? Thanks.

I’ve found with recent mobos the BIOS can be flashed from Windows. This is much much simpler - download, run and reboot.

Jake: “Seriously, can you post the cost breakout of the rig you’re building? Thanks.”

There’s a link to the hardware over at Scott’s blog in yesterday’s post (right at the top).

Anybody else experiencing problems rendering the pictures on this post?

I’m curious about troubleshooting procedures when things don’t go smoothly. For example, I just recently built my own computer as well (with a surprisingly similar build to yours, independently arrived at). It worked well for a few days, but now when I turn it on I get power and fans turn on, but the BIOS POST messages never start - no beep, no monitor activity, nothing. How do I go about troubleshooting this?

Max,
Have a look over at http://blogs.ipona.com/dan/archive/2007/08/02/8412.aspx which covers a few things like memtest, livecds and things to think about if things go wrong.

If the power is going on and the fans are working, but you’re not getting any post messages, have a look and see if your motherboard has a CMOS reset jumper or button. It’s usually used to get overclockers out of trouble and reset their settings back to the defaults when they overclock too high, but in your case, it might just get the BIOS to realise its been switched on. Failing that, my suggestion would be to ask on the mobo manufacturers forum. The lights are on but nobody’s home.

dan