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Well. I have a new power supply. It works fine now that I have it in there and hooked up. All the fans and lights and everything come on. That's spiffy and all that.
However, thanks to the geniuses who built my case and who felt that it was somehow a good idea to put a big, impossible to remove metal bar right next to the power supply, I had to take the CPU fan and heatsink off before I had enough room to get the PSU out and the new one in. After wrestling with it for around 20 minutes or so, breaking a piece on the outer housing of the CPU fan in the process, I finally managed to get it off. Well, turns out I ended up pulling out more than I wanted to because the geniuses also thought it would be a good idea to solder the CPU to the bottom of the heatsink. Long story short, while trying to put the CPU back in (without first trying to separate the CPU from the heatsink, which didn't even occur to me until later), I ended up bending some of the pins on the CPU, meaning it is now little better than scrap to me. So, yay, I have a working PSU, but now I need a new CPU (and probably heatsink/fan).
Oh, and also! In addition to the above, I somehow managed to break off the little L-shaped connector piece of my SATA harddrive for the cable that goes to the motherboard. The pins are still there on the HD, and I found the little piece that broke off, and put it into the end of the cable (even though the piece actually came off of the HD itself), and can put the connection back together and it kind of stays put, but I have no idea if it'll actually work anymore or not. This is my big 640GB harddrive, mind you, with all of my crap on it (aside from the stuff from the old 80GB that got backed up to the 1TB external a while back, but I have since almost filled the 640GB, none of which is backed up). So, not only do I definitely need to get a new CPU now, but I most likely will need a new harddrive as well, because even if that connection does still work, which is in no way certain (and I have no way of even knowing one way or the other until I have a new CPU) I doubt that I would actually trust it for much longer than it would take to copy everything from it to the external HD. Fortunately, most of it is just crap that I've torrented, so even if the HD is indeed completly hosed, it's not all that big of a loss, nor would it be all that difficult to get back later. Just incredibly, horrifically annoying, that's all.
What a colossal pain in my ass this has turned out to be.
This post was made with the Wii by the way, needless to say.
(EDIT)
Just ordered a new CPU and HDD, both of which are pretty much exact duplicates of what's in there now. The only different thing I got was a Zalman fan, as opposed to the Intel fan that's in there (or used to be in there, anyway.) I've decided not to even bother with trying to pull the old CPU off the old fan to salvage it.
It should all be here hopefully early next week.
A small part of me, though, is telling the rest of me that I should just say screw it, toss this computer down the hill altogether, and just start saving for a new one. I don't think I'll be doing that, however, at least not for a few more years yet.
(/EDIT)
However, thanks to the geniuses who built my case and who felt that it was somehow a good idea to put a big, impossible to remove metal bar right next to the power supply, I had to take the CPU fan and heatsink off before I had enough room to get the PSU out and the new one in. After wrestling with it for around 20 minutes or so, breaking a piece on the outer housing of the CPU fan in the process, I finally managed to get it off. Well, turns out I ended up pulling out more than I wanted to because the geniuses also thought it would be a good idea to solder the CPU to the bottom of the heatsink. Long story short, while trying to put the CPU back in (without first trying to separate the CPU from the heatsink, which didn't even occur to me until later), I ended up bending some of the pins on the CPU, meaning it is now little better than scrap to me. So, yay, I have a working PSU, but now I need a new CPU (and probably heatsink/fan).
Oh, and also! In addition to the above, I somehow managed to break off the little L-shaped connector piece of my SATA harddrive for the cable that goes to the motherboard. The pins are still there on the HD, and I found the little piece that broke off, and put it into the end of the cable (even though the piece actually came off of the HD itself), and can put the connection back together and it kind of stays put, but I have no idea if it'll actually work anymore or not. This is my big 640GB harddrive, mind you, with all of my crap on it (aside from the stuff from the old 80GB that got backed up to the 1TB external a while back, but I have since almost filled the 640GB, none of which is backed up). So, not only do I definitely need to get a new CPU now, but I most likely will need a new harddrive as well, because even if that connection does still work, which is in no way certain (and I have no way of even knowing one way or the other until I have a new CPU) I doubt that I would actually trust it for much longer than it would take to copy everything from it to the external HD. Fortunately, most of it is just crap that I've torrented, so even if the HD is indeed completly hosed, it's not all that big of a loss, nor would it be all that difficult to get back later. Just incredibly, horrifically annoying, that's all.
What a colossal pain in my ass this has turned out to be.
This post was made with the Wii by the way, needless to say.
(EDIT)
Just ordered a new CPU and HDD, both of which are pretty much exact duplicates of what's in there now. The only different thing I got was a Zalman fan, as opposed to the Intel fan that's in there (or used to be in there, anyway.) I've decided not to even bother with trying to pull the old CPU off the old fan to salvage it.
It should all be here hopefully early next week.
A small part of me, though, is telling the rest of me that I should just say screw it, toss this computer down the hill altogether, and just start saving for a new one. I don't think I'll be doing that, however, at least not for a few more years yet.
(/EDIT)
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no subject
Date: 2010-01-08 08:22 am (UTC)From:I'm hoping to get a second used computer at some point this winter. They have comps with similar stats to my current one going for 150 or so... which means I likely won't be afraid to go messing around with it!
no subject
Date: 2010-01-08 03:55 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2010-01-08 04:23 pm (UTC)From:Next time I get a new comp, I'll be buying the components piece-wise and assembling it myself - fears be damned. Although used comps I'll still go for the pre-built ones so long as they work. ^^;
no subject
Date: 2010-01-10 11:43 am (UTC)From:Was this computer a custom job built at a local computer store, or a mass produced consumer computer? That metal bar you struggled with sounds like something you might find in an HP or a Dell. This is why I love the internal case pictures they have on Newegg.
IMO, it's new computer time for you. A year ago I used this news post (http://storefront.steampowered.com/Steam/Marketing/message/2269/) by Valve to price out a new system (http://korby.livejournal.com/306233.html). I got something a little less powerful than that, and I'm sure a similarly spec'd computer would run less than $2k today if you want to piece it together yourself. Otherwise, there are those sub-$1k things you can get from Dell/HP/etc if you like having a lot of crapware preinstalled. A 6-year old computer is long overdue for replacing.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-22 07:39 pm (UTC)From:To answer your questions, weeks after the fact, yeah, I don't think it was soldered. Even when I had put the goop on the new old CPU and was trying to fit the fan into that crap-ass case, that one popped out of the slot and was stuck to the fan when I was trying to reposition the fan. Unlike the old one, I was able to get that one detached from the fan though. The old one may as well be soldered on there, as far as I'm able to get it off of the fan. And, honestly, I think the CPU slot on the old motherboard was damaged somehow when I was trying to get the other CPU to go back in there, as it looked kind of... eat up, when I was looking at it later, prior to putting the new CPU into it.
The computer was a custom job built at Intrex (http://www.intrex.com/), a North Carolina-based company. I bought it a few months before I moved out to Redmond. (It was later pointed out that I was probably stupid for buying the new computer in North Carolina, as an equivalent machine would have likely been cheaper buying it out here.)