Brian Frank

If you haven't seen this thread over atAnandtech, you might want to. Apparently, a senator is sponsering a bill that would, among other things, outlaw home-built PC's. 8) I seriously hope this is a joke, but read for yourselves and see...

1 coat primer, 1 coat paint, 1 coat clear coat. I didn't do any sanding in between. I did do a sanding before the primer tho. Seems to be working out really well. I let the parts dry overnight after the last coat. I do the spraying outside or in the garage. I should be putting on the clear coat pretty soon here.

Woohoo! Got the hole done and the primer on. I should be able to put the paint and clear coat on later tonight then bring it in the house.

Damn! My Antec 350W PSU died, totally sucks. I got a Sparkle 350 Watter and everything seems to work fine. Now I just gotta hook the PSU up inside the case and do that last panel and window mod.

Well, I've got all but the panel I'm gonna put the window in painted. Got most of the system reassembled. I'm about as far as I can go on the reassembly right now, as I painted the fronts of my optical and floppy drives. (I did remove the fronts first, BTW). I've rounded my IDE and floppy cables. I want to pick up a cold cathode pretty soon too, but I still got my bill to pay first. Man, I've used a lot of electrical tape on this, but at least It'll look neat.

I'm starting to disassemble the entire thing, parts and all, so I can give it a dusting while I'm at it. That, and I gotta remove the fronts of my external drives to paint.

Have fun, dude.

Pretty much all the reviews say good stuff, but 99.99999999999999% of those who've bought anything OCZ have been mad as hell with the products and service. They have such a bad rep among users that I don't even consider them. I can't stress how much this company is despised. If those who've been pissed off by OCZ came together, I'd imagine they'd be storming Indiana to go torch OCZ head quarters.

Well, I'm gonna repaint my case, and do it right this time. I'm also adding a window mod while I'm at it. I may get a cathode kit too, not sure, may wait for my next paycheck...

It's funny, jdulmage has been banned quite a while back, and he's still in the top 10. ;(

In otherwords, I am the king of spam at NTCompatible?

I feel the same way: It's my computer, and I will have the final say as to exactly what will go on it. I don't mind stuff coming up to ask if I want it on my machine, but I do mind when/if something automatically installs without my say so. Pop-up ads are annoying, but auto-install software is even worse.

I agree. First, as this is a test system, I think that it would be a real waste of money to buy oodles of potentially expensive hardware for a practice test. If you have the money, great, but more than likely not. For a real business server, yes, Via would probably be inappropriate, although Dell has made some servers featuring Via chipsets. I've been using many Via board with excellent stability, and one has the infamous 686B/SBLive! combo with it, and is a dual processor board. I overclock, I use RAID, I use HighPoint, Promise and CMD controllers, both AMD and Intel chips, Creative sound cards, a number of USB devices, mixed RAM, loaded motherboards, and I am very satisfied with what I am getting from Via. I know I'm not the only one here, either. Like any computer, if you think about what you're doing a little bit, you're much less likely to run into troubles. I'm not saying Via is perfect, but they have done much to improve, and they are 2nd in chipsets to Intel. Via has a bad history, and does have problems still today, but at the same time, NOT EVERYONE HAS THOSE PROBLEMS TO DEAL WITH ALRIGHT! I'm very sick, and very tired of hearing "Don't buy Via because they suck" comments. [/Rant]

Yes. Pardon my rudeness in anyway, but you have asked this before. The answer was "yes".

The scary part is that a representative has even thought up of something like this. They only see one side, and that's cushioning Hollywood. So all the consumer's get screwed--big deal. Ban all Open-source stuff...ummm and Windows doesn't have an OS monopoly now? It's stuff like this that make me want to not tell people on-line I'm an American. Never underestimate the power of stupid officials!

Incorrect, Mike. The IDE RAID controller on the MSI board is one of the ATA133 ones for which XP does not have built-in support. Regardless, the NT family is very picky about having unrecognized IDE controllers swapped in without getting some sort of driver first. And that means, it has to know what's there before switching the hard drive to it. As it appears he's switching motherboards, your suggestion just won't work. Otherwise, what your saying is true. You're pretty much gonna have to reinstall. Changing the IDE controller out from any NT OS (NT/2K/XP) is basically asking for a reinstall. There is safe mode in XP, but if you've switched IDE controllers, it'll do you little good. Do a reinstall. If you need to get into safe mode, hit F8 before the white progress bar starts going, or even better, before you see it. There are most definitely some unfamiliar things about XP, as it's based on an entirely different core than 98. It's NT vs. 9x. Oh, for that MSI board, make sure you all the files of the driver on a floppy disk so you can install the Ultra ATA/RAID controller during installation. Right when you see the blue screen at the beginning of the install, hit F6 'to install SCSI controllers'(And yes, Windows will think you have SCSI). A few minutes later, you'll have to feed Windows install that floppy with the ATA/RAID controller.

Yup. So there were two guys talking in a bar...

I can't really think of anything other than something in Windows getting messed up or an update you didn't need screwing something up. It could be that the motherboard is crapping out. Seen this sorta stuff before with dying mobo's. Go ahead and try a reinstall for now. Also, what hard drive are you using, especially the one you're installing Windows on (if you have more than 1).

I should also state that I haven't been keeping up with the latest and greatest on that situation, as I didn't order one. I went by the last info I'd know of. Glad to see you got your deal, tho.

Too funny. Personally, I've found it's generally a good idea to keep politics out of forums as much as possible. Things have gotten very brutal to say the least. I'm glad I haven't run into it much really.

Excuse my ignorance, but since when have you been able to hide drives from within BIOS?

I just thought of something: are you trying to hide the drive in device manager, or under My Computer? If it's the latter, good ol' TweakUI has a listing of all possible drive letters. Uncheck the drive letters you don't want seen and reboot.

RtCW was a lame FPS game. I'm waiting for Unreal 2 and Jedi Knight II to hit.

Quote: The easiest way for me to "hide" them was to use slide chassis for the drives. I'm not really sure what that is, but the X-setup and GPedit were the only things to my knowledge that could do it. Maybe clutch can explain, because I sure can't.

FYI, there's a petition on-line if anyone feels inclined to sign it. It does have quite a few votes. Link: http://www.petitiononline.com/SSSCA/