Resurrecting my old PC

Ha, I'm feeling pretty idiotic but happy at the same time.

I made a PC components "wish list" back in Nov 2005 since the PC I had built in March of 2004 could not run a game I had wanted to play at the time, Battlefield 2 .

$125 - AMD 3000+ (Socket 939)
$127 - Asus SLI motherboard
$85 - Corsair Value 1GB
$99 - Antec Sonata II w/ 450W PSU
$175 - WD Raptor 74GB
$333 - eVGA 7800GT 256MB
$333 - eVGA 7800GT 256MB
$46 - NEC ND-3540A 16X Dual Layer DVD+/-RW
$1323 - Total cost as of Nov 2005

However, frugality prevailed. At that time, I couldn't justify the cost of building a new PC given that my PC from spring 2004 was less than 2 years old and it would just be for one game. Historically, $1300 has been my target budget. For that amount I could indeed get much better GPUs (I wanted SLI) but I could only afford the same CPU (my 2004 AMD 3000+ CPU is a socket 754 version) and the same amount of RAM. I thought to myself, "not a big enough upgrade for $1300." So in March of 2006, I ended up getting a 7800GS AGP GPU card as a stop gap which has served me very well.

Fast forward to Sept 2008. This year has shown some amazing price-to-performance on all PC components and I've amassed a backlog of more recent PC games as my old PC simply did not have enough horsepower to run them.

So I thought to myself that I would take my time and snap up on deals for components if the price was right. I picked up the Antec P182 case that went on sale and wanted to try out the case by moving the motherboard over from my older 2004 PC. In the process of doing this, I thought I had fried my old PC motherboard. I was working on the carpet in our loft and me being stupidly lazy, I did not properly ground myself. Yes, *smack my hand*. Before I moved anything from the old chassis to the new one I unplugged a few cables from the mother board such as the chassis power switch cable and the reset switch cable. Not too long afterwards, I changed my mind on moving over my old components to the new chassis and plugged the old cables back in to the old chassis. I then re-tried powering on the old chassis. The PC would not boot up at all. *Doh!* The light on the motherboard would show power but when you pressed the power switch, the chassis fan and CPU fan would move a little but that's it. I unplugged all the motherboard cables and reseated the hard drive IDE and power cables, the GPU card, and the power supply from the motherboard. This went on for a while until I was convinced that I had fried my motherboard.

I said to myself, "Great. Looks like I'll need to cough up for a new rig soon." I was frustrated and disappointed in myself since 1) I thought I had destroyed a good working PC and 2) I was now going to spend money much sooner than I had anticipated.

It didn't take me long to create a parts list for the new PC. You can read my follow up post above for the specifics.

To the reader who is familiar with PC building, you might have noticed that I did not mention whether or not I re-seated the DRAM. That's because I didn't and it turns out that a week later I had thought about doing it since it was the one of the two things I didn't try - the other being re-seating my CPU . I thought re-seating the DRAM would unlikely have any affect since I did not touch my DRAM at all during the previous week. But sure enough, I re-seated the DRAM and voila, my PC was able to boot up fine and it worked again! I am still unclear as to why this worked. By this time I had already ordered all the new PC components from mwave.com and there were no refunds on the retailed box CPU. I decided to just keep my order as it was and not return anything. Part of me felt like such a dunce! But to be perfectly honest, I got over it pretty quick. Having waited almost 3 years to build a new PC, I was actually more excited knowing a new PC was going to be made.