the vynsane asylum

do it yourself. there's nothing like discovering how to make it all work on your own. and it's relatively easy. the hairiest part is putting the heasink on the processor. if you have a new 64 bit AMD, it shouldn't be a problem, though because they have a heatshield on them. the old AMD athlons had the processor die bare, and if you crushed it, you destroyed it, or at the very least shortened the lifespan of the chip.

i'll find some resources for you to get you set up in DIY. let me know what hardware you're getting so i can find the right info.

I'll post the parts in here as I buy them. Thanks again for your help.

I know, I know, double post - but I wanted to draw attention to this one as it's my money on the line. Vyn et al, here's the list of parts I'm looking at buying locally. Please scream loudly if I'm falling into a shit pit with any of this stuff:

Motherboard: Asus Socket 939 A8V Deluxe K8T800
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 939 pin
RAM: 2 x 512 MB sticks (will work in conjuncion on dual channel MB)
Monitor: Acer AL 1914 19" LCD (discount price of $355 CDN!)
Sound card: Soundblaster Live! 24bit (fucking double the price up here)

The only thing I can't seem to find at any price I can justify is the video card. $28 at NewEgg is just stupidly low. I'm likely going to wind up getting it sent from there to my brother, as it's still going to save me a ton of cash.

Now for drives: do I need a DVD burner AND a DVD Rom drive? Just thinking, 2 drives makes the copying easier, n'est-ce pas?

I'm buying this stuff now because there are coupons available for the next week that can save me almost $200 on what I've listed.

it sounds good...

i would do the dvd-rom and dvd burner. it makes life easier. as for the motherboard - it sounds like a killer, but i would forego the 2x512 ram sticks and get a single 1 gig stick. the board supports up to 4 gigs, for chrissake. when you want to upgrade, you're just going to end up wasting those 512 sticks. it will cost more up front, but in the long run you won't waste as much money.

Copy that.

Okay, so (yes I'm double posting again - but besides that) I'm here for the first time using MY NEW MONITOR (Acer 19" LCD Flat Panel - absolutely mental), and of course it's acting wonky.

Thank God, there are no dead pixels that I can see.... but when I went to resize my display, everything's looking a little blurry and miscoloured. When I revert to the old size, my colours stay bad but the blurry goes away. If anyone knows the fix, that would be super.

The motherboard and CPU are going to have to be ordered apparently, they don't have any in stock right now. Fine with me... but the sooner the better.

your monitor isn't acting wonky - lcd displays have a "native resolution" - that is, the resolution that it's meant to be set at. anything less than that is going to be blurry and miscolored, as you have like, 4 screen pixels pretending to be one pixel. a 19" monitor usually has a native res of 1280x1024 - set it to that, and you should be golden. if that's not it, set it to the highest resolution you can find in the "settings" tab of the "display properties" box. you should really only use an lcd at it's native resolution.

Yeah, it's weird. I did try that - setting to the highest res possible - and that's when it went blurry. When I go back to 800 x 600, the blur is gone, but now the colours want to stay fucked up (whereas they looked fine when I first started it up - they only went weird when I started resizing things). I've defragged, shut right down and started up again - but I'm still looking at odd green boxes around the Hasslehead that weren't there on my old monitor.

Try degauzing it if you havent already. Maybe you need a new video card.

What does degauzing mean, KH? I'd say you're right about the vid card - this thing's capabilities are really far behind - but it's weird that it would start up okay and then just wonk out. I've had my desktop go colour-weird before, and I'm not sure what I've done in the past to get it to sort out. The days are numbered for this box anyhow, so I'll live with it if I have to.

There is a button on my monitor thats called Degause. It basically shakes all the shit off the screen and clears it up. Maybe you could change the settings, IE: contrast and brightness and shit.

Oh, okay. I haven't tried that stuff - but I'm hesitant to do it because I know I didn't fuck around with it when I hooked it up. I might have to go that far, but I'll search for troubleshooting and shit like that first. Not that big a deal, more of a piss of than anything.

i don't think lcd's have or need degauss... it's mainly a magnetic thing for cathode ray tubes. i could be wrong. but i've never used degauss on an lcd.

is it hooked up with a DVI connection, or a VGA? usually the DVI is a white plug and the VGA is a blue one.

Yes, if it is a DVI cable, it could possibly be bad. I do know they will change the colors on an HDTV.

Yes, it's the old type of connection. When the new PC is up I'll be connecting it through DVI to the vid card and I'll have XP running to automatically detect it's best settings - I'm sure that will take care of it.

I got the CPU and a 1GB stick of RAM yesterday as well as ordering the motherboard. It's fun to go ahead and start buying stuff, but the task of putting it together is a bit daunting. I looked at the instructions on how to put the chip in - and it looks like "no tools required" which rocks.

It does say to take electrostatic precautions though - how do you avoid frying your parts with your body's static electricity?