Upgrades (Round 2) Part 1

I realized yesterday that I haven't written about some of things that happened recently.

I was going to upgrade the Dell computer I acquired to a dual core, but after ordering the parts, I found out that the BIOS is locked to certain processors (which is one of the main reasons why I never buy desktops and build them instead). So I ended up doing a build for it, which I'm not really going to go into.

I found that the Zalman CNPS9700 that I installed for Lie-chan was not plugged in... Oops. Luckily, it wasn't a problem, and I just plugged it in and toyed with some settings in BIOS to spin it down some.

After the Intel build, I decided to poke around Mei-chan a bit and I found the reason why she was loud was the 9700, so I ordered a Zalman CNPS9900 Max and put in the old fan controller that was originally for Ziggy (back when I had the 92mm Vantec Tornado in the case) while I was waiting for it to arrive. Installation was a bit difficult, since the tool supplied with that specific one was a bit short in the nib and lacking the bevel, which ended up stripping enough of the screw head to make it annoying... I had to use the short end to finish mounting it. It also warped the motherboard slightly, but not nearly as much as the stock 775 cooler on the Intel build...

For the Intel build, I removed the stock cooler and put in the 9700 from Mei-chan, along with Zalman's Fan Mate 2 fan-controller on the front of the case, which cooled the processor down about 10C compared to the stock cooler.

Mei-chan isn't nearly as loud as she used to be, but she's not dead silent either.

Oh, I found that if I discharge a large amount of electro-static to Mei-chan's case, the voltage leak noise stops until I turn her off after booting, but it's less annoying than the PSU power switch I think *shrugs*

I also cut the mouse from the VAIO in half to use the scroll wheel since the Marble Mouse doesn't have a scroll wheel and the scroll ring on the Wacom tablet is too far when I need a quick scroll. I just need to get used to it now.

I recently upgraded Melty from the AMD FX 8120 to the AMD FX 8320 and noticed the improvement that the other Newegg reviewers noticed that did the same upgrade. I'm also going to upgrade the keyboard for Melty as well from the Logitech Illuminated Keyboard to the G710+ mechanical gaming keyboard.

I technically don't need the extra gaming features on the G710+ (in fact, a mechanical keyboard would have worked just fine, but I'm a Logitech loyalist), but hey, I can't really complain about more macro buttons XP

Main reason why I'm replacing the keyboard is that it's getting annoying to use sometimes... I think I pressed pause/play when I didn't press it down enough... and sometimes if I want it to go to the next song, it'll ghost press it for me, so it skips a song -_-;; not to mention that sometimes when I hit say Shift+F5, it doesn't respond, so either I have to hit it again or I have to hold it down -_-;;

I'm sure the contact sheets just need a cleaning, but I don't want to turn it into a periodic maintenance when I can get a keyboard that I won't have to worry about for a long, long while.

Well, within a couple months I'll have my own internet, so hopefully that works out better than the internet my parents are using... and have my own computer network complete with NAS! I'm so stoked!

Well, I think I'm done for now - building computers that is. There won't be a need to replace/upgrade any of the compies for a long while... Well, the BD-RW drive upgrade maybe, but that's pretty minor. I don't use Triela all that much, so she works well as a laptop (sometimes I use Momiji Sae-chan, but that's a bit different).