Results of weekend comp work

[Gig-O-Ram]

I spent the entire weekend working on both comps! Well, only because I did other stuff too...

I got the new, recycled HSF going in my wife's machine, and now we can barely hear it. She came into the room when I had it hooked back up, and said she didn't even know it was on. You can hear it a little, but nowhere near what it was with the stock fan. I had to turn the clip over though, because part of the retention bracket on the cooler was going to knock heads with a cap right next to the CPU. I got it worked out.

My rig was another deal. Long story short, I completely dismantled it and gave it a thorough cleaning out. It was dirtier inside than I thought - you should've seen the dust bunnies I pulled out of the SB cooler! So, then with all hardware cleaned up, I spent most of the day putting it back together. I ran a lot of wires behind the board this time - mostly fan controller cables, and a few others. It makes it all a little more workable. But now I'm having a problem with the controller where it keeps running all the fans on full volts, and when I reset it, it starts doing it again. It's been kinda weird from the day I got it, so I figured it needs to be replaced. So I just bought a Zalman MFC1 controller, and hopefully it won't give me any headaches. I also redid the AS5 on the HSF and I even got the SB cooler off and replaced the thermal tape with AS5. So now I got AS5 on SB, CPU and GPU.

Then on to installing XP. I wiped my hdd, then set up a 50/50 partition. I've never run multiple partions before on a single drive, so I thought I'd try it. So, I get XP installed with no issues. I was also able to get it validated with no issues, once I got a live service rep. I tried it on the phone, but the system wouldn't let me do it. The person I spoke with gave me no problems. She just asked the ?'s she's supposed to ask, and I got it validated. Now I've gotten about 75 critical updates, several software updates including IE 7 and WMP 11. I've got all the security set up and going good and all my stuff back in place - except games - so I'm stylin'! "MegaRig" - now a year old - is reborn...sort of.