I am at what I hope is the end of a long and frustrating ordeal with my home PC. This kind of thing happens more often than I’d like, and is the main reason I have so often considered just giving up on Microsoft Windows and switching to a Mac. It all started when I tried to update my NVIDIA device driver to the latest version a few days ago. When I did, the screen would just randomly blank out for several seconds at a time every minute or two. So I found that it stopped doing that when I pulled the hardware acceleration slider on the device control panel all the way over to “No Acceleration”. I thought everything was fine until Sunday. That day, 404 Not Found was rehearsing and trying to record our rehearsal with the thought that we could make a new CD out of it. Well, the PC just started randomly locking up on me. So, we didn’t get a recording, and I spent about 12 of the next 30 hours trying to figure out what went wrong. I even bought a new video card, when I got so frustrated with NVIDIA. But the new card didn’t work either, and caused the same problems. In fact, things got worse, to the point where the PC would just freeze after being booted about 4 minutes. But it’s only an issue under Windows XP. Windows 98 runs as rock solid as ever. Well, about 90 minutes ago I downloaded and flashed the latest BIOS for my PC, and now all of a sudden things seem quite stable. My computer has been running in XP mode since then and I haven’t seen a problem. And now I have an ATI video card that I don’t need.
But the real reason I started writing this blog entry is this: While waiting for Windows to crash on me again after updating the BIOS, I installed a new power supply. This has nothing to do with the crashes I was having, but my old power supply had a bearing that was going bad or something. It would get into this mode where it was 4 or 5 times as loud as usual. So I shopped around online for a new power supply. And I wanted to intentionally find one that was advertised as being quiet. Man, did I find a winner! I bought a Seasonic SS-300FS from Silicon Acoustics, which bill themselves as “the silent PC enthusiast’s resource.” I wish I had discovered this company years ago! They have all kinds of awesome components for building a quiet PC. This Seasonic power supply I got is so quiet, I couldn’t even believe it was on when I hit the power switch. I was laughing out loud. Now, with the case on, I can hear the furnace fan downstairs more clearly than my computer 2 feet from my face. It’s awesome. And best of all, this really quiet supply cost the same as what I paid for my old noisy supply. You can be sure that when it comes time to replace components or build a new PC from scratch, I’ll head back to Silicon Acoustics for parts. The only problem is they don’t seem to carry cases, but they have everything else you could want.
Oh, in other news, supposedly someone actually left a comment on some blog entry. It’s a guy from the Team Fortress Classic team I play on. And as far as I can tell, he’s the first person ever to use the comment feature. I’ll have to go look for what he wrote. And then it’s bedtime.