Battling endless PC assembly problems, but I am back on the web. Lessons learned:

Never, ever buy a 1.4GHz Athlon. Sure, the price/performance looked good at the time.
But I am suffering from severe overheating problems, and my system is still freezing
up about once an hour on average. Now that I’ve factored in the time, money, and heartache
dealing with this problem (I calculate heartache at roughly $20/hour), it would have been far
more efficient to go with a fast PIII. So far, here’s what I’ve tried.

1. Baseline. Steady state chip temperature: 68 degrees C.
2. New chassis with better airflow, extra fan. Temperature: 59 degrees C.
3. Taking off the chassis side door. Now we’re going ghetto. Temperature: 56 degrees C.
4. Underclocking to 1.05 GHz. Please don’t tell anyone on WatercooledAthlonEnthusiast.com… I have a reputation to protect. Temperature: 49 degrees C.

All temperature measurements are with the Asus motherboard probe. Some say this
probe is off by up to 10 degrees. Some say it’s pretty accurate. Heck, I don’t
even know if the temperature is uniform across the chip. Nor do I know what magic
temperature will eliminate the freezing problem completely, although I hear rumors
that 50 degrees is pretty close. Welcome to the mystical world of Computer “Science”.

Never, ever use Microsoft Outlook Express. Well, ok, everyone says this.
Here’s what gets me: the total inability to
export old email messages. You can’t export messages into *.PST files in Outlook Express
without getting MAPI errors. You can’t import *.PST files either, because the import
function refuses to deal with files… just “identities”. Huh?

Microsoft does have a very clearly-written technical article (#Q176267)
on this subject, with step-by-step instructions. Unfortunately, the
instructions don’t have anything to do with reality.

So if you’re using Outlook Express, you might as well scrawl your old email messages
in cuneiform on the back of your motherboard. ‘Cause they ain’t leaving your hard
drive, ever.

Never assume that if you buy a new piece of hardware, the shipped drivers are current.
I hear the crowd saying, “Duh”, so let’s move on.

Never assume that PC assembly and compatibility problems improve or go away with time.
See sidebar.

At this point, it’s time to start calling technical support for the various vendors.
Perhaps they’ll be helpful. Isn’t it pretty to think so?

When I built my first system in 1998, I was pretty impressed with how easy things were. Basically I
just plugged things in, clicked through a few screens, and everything worked. The hardest
part was figuring out how the motherboard fit into the chassis.
(Pat and I scratched our heads over all those metal widgets for a couple of hours,
to be sure.)

But everything else was idiot-proof. You couldn’t even plug anything in backwards.
It was great. We were up and running
Starcraft in no time.

I had heard that in the bad old days, building a computer was
difficult. For Serious Enthusiasts Only. But along came standards. Plug ‘N Play, USB,
huzzah!

Things seemed to be working reasonably well three years ago. I assumed things
would be the same today. Oh, well.

The only thing certain to remain constant — my own naivete.