(no subject)

I went to Des Moines yesterday and picked up my new mobo and processor. I got a Giga-Byte KT600 and an Athlon 2600+. I wanted the 2400 since it was cheaper, but they ran out. Bah. Anyway, that ended up coming to around 180 bucks altogether. I managed to get the motherboard into the case and plugged in on my own, just because I'm so impatient like that. I was ready to hook everything up and try it out when I realized that the damn thing didn't have onboard video.....hence, there was nowhere to plug in my monitor so that I could actually see what was going on. So, I drove all over town to Radio Shack, Best Buy, and Staples to see if any of them carried some kind of adaptor or something, but alas. No such thing exists. I finally had to buy a 60-dollar graphics card at Best Buy. It came with a $10 mail-in rebate, but that's still $50 more than I wanted to spend to begin with. That brings the total to $230. That's half of what I still owe on the damn thing to my grandparents. Dave showed up not long after I got back from Best Buy, and we flipped a lot of switches and whatnot on the motherboard to get all the settings right. Thanks for the help, by the way. It would have taken me hours to figure out what was not working. Ok, so we get it to boot into Windows, and I'm just about ready to celebrate a victory....when the mouse and keyboard stop responding. About 30 minutes of phone calls and internet searches later, we still couldn't figure out why it was not allowing the mouse and keyboard to work. Leave it to me to get the one flawed motherboard in the entire stack while I was in Des Moines. The next course of action is to go BACK to Des Moines and have them test the motherboard to see if it is the source of the problem. If it is, great, I'll exchange it for a different one and get everything hooked back up tonight. If it's not, then I don't know what the hell happens next. Dan thinks it's a problem with Windows which will require me to nuke the hard drive and reinstall everything, but that wouldn't explain why the problem was evident in BIOS, too. I'm really hoping that it's the simple problem of faulty PS/2 ports. Knowing my luck, though, it won't be. I shouldn't get my hopes up.

Well, I always have to find the silver lining to everything that goes bad, so at least I didn't hook something up wrong and fry everything, right?

(no subject)

Guess who's online again!!!! Yeah, that's right. I finally have my computer up and running again. A new mouse and keyboard seemed to do the trick, although I'm very curious to know why neither of my mice worked before. It's a paradox. Anyway, I'm $250 poorer than I was last week, but I have my precious computer back.

....I also have a strawberry limeade in my possession. Mwaha.