I had been thinking of building a new PC for a while now. I built my P4 over 4 years ago from back in my Circuit City days. It was getting super loud; especially the graphics card fan. It was also super slow. I installed Windows 7 RC1 a while back and was running good but it degraded pretty bad over 7 months. My RC1 trial was set to expire so I need to install my pre-ordered copy of Windows 7 but wanted to do it on a fresh hard drive. I kept reading about how awesome TRIM and SSDs were so I decided to get one. I also got a new graphics card since mine was so loud. I was a little scared at the time since I knew there was a possibility that it wouldn’t work in my motherboard.

I bought the below items from New Egg on the first run.

1. SAPPHIRE 100284L Radeon HD 5750 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16
2. Kingston SSDNow V Series SNV425-S2BD/64GB

I installed both but ran into issue. Everything would boot but I couldn’t get the screen to show anything. I played around with it for a while then went to my basketball game. I came back and played with it some more to find that now it wouldn’t even boot. The only thing that it would do was light the motherboard power light. After numerous hours and not getting one bios error beep I bought a new powersupply below.

1. CORSAIR CMPSU-650TX 650W

I got the unit and still no change. I removed all the components and still didn’t get any bios beep errors so I knew it has to be the motherboard. I priced out a system on Newegg then went to MicroCenter to compare. I was in a rush and wanted to be done with this system so I paid the extra price for MicroCenter even though both Newegg shipments I received the next day after ordering since they shipped from Nashville.

I ordered the following

1. Intel i3-530
2. GigaByte P55A-UD3
3. Corsair XMS3 2 x 2GB

These items did the trick. The install in my existing case took a couple hours. I got hung up on the 4 x4 PS connection because there wasn’t one. The box showed a picture on it and the instructions said that there was a converter cable to convert to a 4×2 if you had an older motherboard. Well they lied and instead had two 4×2 connectors which I just plugged both in right next to each other.

I was hoping to take a Window 7 experience test on my old PC and compare it with the SSD drive to see the difference but didn’t happen since I couldn’t get it running. I can see that it jumped big on my new install but the new processor and board could have something to do with that. Needless to say, above is my before and below is my after. I am a little disappointed with the SSD score. As you can tell, its not that much in difference compared to my previous setup. I also can not figure out how to “overclock” my memory. It is hows as a 1300 even though it is a 1600. I looked at the bios and everything was maxed out. I will need to do some further reading.

Overall I am extremely happy with my purchase even though I didn’t want to spend this much on it since I rarely use the machine. Plus its basically only a web surfing machine since I do all my gaming though the Xbox.  I love its speed of use and boot time.

I was traveling a lot the past week for work. I started in Maine and worked my way down to New York City. It was a pretty exhausting week since we were hitting multiple sites between 5 states in 5 days. Didn’t do much but work. We did have a drive by Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower 2. I planned on staying the weekend with relatives in upper New York. I found out in the middle of the trip that other relatives from St Louis were arriving to NYC on Friday which was a great surprise. So I met them and my other relatives in Times Square for a dinner and a stroll through China Town.

We ate at a very interesting place in Little Italy on Friday. It was Puglia on the border on China Town. My uncle had been before and seeing a ton of young coeds doing the “napkin dance” had us convinced that we needed to try it out. I had some Peroni and tortellinis stuffed with ricotta cheese and chicken in a pink sauce. It was delicious. We made a subway detour to Grand Central Station then walked around Times Square but we were freezing and it was rainy.

I went to a charity event at a local firehouse in town Saturday night. It was a lot of fun and was for a good cause. Beer and dancing was all around.

Sunday was a little disappointing. I was so looking forward to going back home to spend some time with the lady. The weather did not agree. I wasn’t 100% sure that I could make it back to St Louis so I had to book another flight the following day. I had to book a different airline out of a different airport. That was a first.

Here are some pictures from the weekend.