Category: My Life

My Journey with my desktop P.C – Part 3 (Finale)

estudiante de la vida 0 Comments March 5, 2020August 28, 2020 General My Life S.T.E.A.M.

Wow, I can’t believe how much time has passed since I first intended to post this update. It has been about 5 months, and a lot of things happened since then. Helping my parents deal with and recover from the coronavirus. Losing my job, at a time where seeking employment is very difficult.  A movement, re energized due to several people of color making their transition because panicked stricken individuals feeling the need to play God. Crazy, unfortunate times, but one can’t lament over this for too long.  I’m not convinced it will remain this way forever.  It’s a difficult task, but I’m confident I, along with others, will figure out a way to unite us Globally. I just pray it doesn’t require war and mass deaths before the future I pray for comes to pass.

Alright, I stepped off my soapbox and I shall get to the real meaning behind this article. At the time of this post, my computer has been stable for two months. This experience has definitely humbled me, and although it came with frustrations, I definitely learned and grew.  Shortly after posting Part 2, my computer crashed again. “Oh the Agony!!” As an IT professional, with one of my specialities being technical support. How can I fix so many customer’s issues but can’t seem to resolve my own? This was unacceptable and I vowed I would reach a satisfactory resolution. “Back to the drawing board!”

I decided to take my PC a part again, leaving only the essentials. CPU, RAM and of course the motherboard.  I heard the famous ASUS beep and my computer turned on and POST successfully. However, I noticed something that I never paid much attention to in the past. Even though the computer booted, I realized an LED on the motherboard was not the right color. Unfortunately the motherboard manual couldn’t explain it, but it did get me thinking. My RAM has gen 5/6 written on the label, but my CPU and motherboard was generation 9. In hindsight, this seems very obvious, but at this moment I had an epiphany. Let me try obtaining some RAM for this generation’s CPU and motherboard. I procured the Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4 DRAM 2666MHz (PC4-21300) C16 Memory Kit – Black and hastily inserted them into my DIMM slots. I immediately saw a difference. The LED on the motherboard was no longer red, but instead solid green. I did it, I solved my problem. However, I was disappointed after thinking about all the various items I purchased, that weren’t necessary. Thankfully, that feeling didn’t last with me for too long. Afterall, I learned a lot because of this experience. It also gave me a good story to share, hopefully helping someone avoid the mistakes I made. Persistence was the key to solving this problem and knowledge was my reward. Unfortunately, my happiness didn’t last too long, because two months later, the computer crashed again.

However, as upset as I was that it crashed, I was still confident that I solved the original problem. A new issue arose and I definitely can take a little blame on this one. A month before crashing I was getting errors that my CPU was overheating, but I ignored it. I also would hear gurgling sound as if there was a leak or something. I had a liquid cooler that was less than a year old, so there was no possible way this thing failed on me so quickly. Yet it did, and if I read the reviews on that cooler prior to my purchase, I could have avoided this headache.  So I rushed out to microcenter and purchased a CPU cooling solution that was highly rated among PC aficionados. I viewed several youtube videos as well as read several articles on PC cooling before installing it. I’m glad that I did, because after installation, my CPU was a solid 34 degrees centigrade when idle. The previous cooling solution after installation brought me to about 42 degrees. It’s been two months since then and I’m still maintaining that temperature.

I’m grateful to my father for teaching me how to build computers almost 20 years ago. I’m grateful to the creator that gave me a personality to never give up and always remain humble. This was a lesson that came with equal parts frustration and elation. The next and final thing I hope to do with this build is add three SSDs in Raid 5 configuration to replace my raid 1 storage solution. I’m also considering obtaining a larger NVMe PCIe SSD for my games. For now I just uninstall after I complete the game. However games are getting larger and larger and I’m getting lazier and lazier. We will see.

Thanks for reading!