Anybody else want to put their foot through their computer?

[Scott_Irving]

I've spent way to much money on this new system and I've spent many hours trying to get the damn thing working properly.

For Reference here's my beastie's specs

Zalman GS-1000 (two weeks later they released the "+" model with proper harddrive cooling, ill mod mine to have it)
Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 (from what i understand second best they made at the time)
Intel Core i7 920 2.66Ghz Quad (im told is a really good overclocker)
Corsair DDR3 1600Mhz 3x2GB XMS3 Platinum (not really expensive but wasn't cheap)
Zalman heatpipe cooled 750Watt power supply (modular which is always nice)
Kingston 64GB V Series SSD hard drive (my first SSD)
4x Seagate 500GB 7200 drives (all to be in raid, maybe 6x when done)
2x ATI Radeon 4850's 1GB/512MB Vid Cards (my first crossfire setup, maybe ill upgrade to 5870's in the new year)
Gobs of fans and controllers

Was running windows 7 RC and then took a spare drive out of it and put in my recently acquired PowerMac G5 and boom stopped working, spent the last two days trying to get it to work again to no avail. Downloading the windows 7 enterprise version trial see if maybe it will work. heard the RC build had issues with RAID hardware and my specific motherboard chipset. Bloody annoying considering id wanted to be working on this site for the last two evenings not farting around with all these problems. Probably just buy win7 next week when it comes out either way.

Update: Epic failz. Win7 Enterprise didn't work any better. Looks like I've got bad ram or worse yet a bad motherboard.

[Eth]

Sounds dreadful.  I've had my share of annoyances over the last 25 years of computing, but nothing as bad as what you've just described, I think. 

[Smoke353]

I've wanted to put my foot through nearly every computer I've used since Vista was released. 

[Megagun]

Get Hiren's BootCD (absolutely vital to anyone who's sometimes messing about with his PC!), and run some tests on it. Make sure you run memtest86 and SMART self-tests on the harddrives. Also try out a Linux liveCD (recommending Ubuntu here) to see if it's Win7 being not very compatible with your hardware, or your hardware being broken somewhere..

[Lukipela]

I sometimes wonder if I should try and build my own computer. Stuff like this makes me glad I haven't tired. I barely have any spare time as it is, I wouldn't want to spend it on trying to get my computer to actually work. Good luck with getting this to work, I hope it works out.

[Dragon]

Anybody else want to put their foot through their computer?

Regularly, usually because I end up on hardware support, worming my around server rooms trying to extricate a blown power supply or whatever.

More personally I recently (~3 months ago) bought myself an ATI 4890 card and, alas, one of the memory chips was faulty.  The reseller wasn't interested in trying to solve the problem in a reasonsable time frame so I took it back to the importer.  Unfortunately the problem was way beyond the poor techie I got assigned - she had her diagnostics software (which wasn't failing) and didn't really know what to do.  After some back and forthing I got the card swapped out.  Which should have been the end of it.

Only whilst trying to get the faulty card to work I (unknowingly) completely buggered up the drivers.  So now the new card starts failing erratically - which is about where I *really* wanted to put my foot through my computer.  However said card wasn't behaving like it was a hardware problem but no amount of uninstalling and reinstalling of drivers would make it work.  Finally - in desperation - I wiped windows and reinstalled which fixed it.

The whole episode was time consuming and unpleasant but - that said - I'd still heartily recommend the 4890.  It really is an excellent piece of hardware and no games have taxed it yet (including Fallout 3 with mega-texture packs, greenworld and enhanced models).

[EDIT] Don't I feel like a prat now.  I meant 4890, not 4870

[Scott_Irving]

Mega: I've run multiple tests and I've even used different hard drives. I do have said boot disc. I haven't had any tests fail. Worse yet I did have 7 running perfectly. I did run a live cd to run Gpart, never had any problems. I could try a live disc of the full O/S.

Dragon: Yeah 4870's are nice, at the time they were quite a bit more money, and not a real huge jump over the 4850's, course I've got two 4850's now which from what i understand out perform a single 4870 now anyway. Now 4890's.. big jump, the 5800 series that's out now blows those away again.

Update: progress, I switched my drive to the secondary SATA controller, rather then what should have been the better Intel based controller. Windows did have drivers for this other controller (Jmicron) however I had to manually load Vista 64bit drivers to get it to read the drive properly I guess cause after that it did progress further. Woop and as I'm typing this it crashed.. when it was just about done. Well some progress is better then none.

Update: I disabled ACHI and rebooted, It got a little further then right in the middle of setting up my user account boom. restarted. no warning nothing. Maybe it's a power supply or the motherboard?

Update again: I erased the bios and reset it all to defaults and now the system boots. However the ram isn't running at spec now.

[Alen]

Sounds nightmarish, I'm glad I don't have as many issues with the hardware. (I mainly have software issues)

[Scott_Irving]

Well I continued to have issues, so I flashed the bios to the newest BETA version and changed a few more settings, It appears to be ok now, as I'm typing from it and it has been running for 3 hours now. However as soon as I try to get my WEI rating it crashes right at the end.

[Nuclear]

Hmmmm, are you sure that Windows 7 is compatible with your hardware or missing any essential drivers? Maby since Windows 7 is still BETA it might have trouble running hardware at different amounts of RAM allocation or something (Man, I miss Bill...Windows 95 was the best!) If problems still persist, you may have to resort to generic hardware although thats never fun...

[Smoke353]

Hmmmm, are you sure that Windows 7 is compatible with your hardware or missing any essential drivers? Maby since Windows 7 is still BETA it might have trouble running hardware at different amounts of RAM allocation or something (Man, I miss Bill...Windows 95 was the best!) If problems still persist, you may have to resort to generic hardware although thats never fun...

If 95 could handle my 12GB of RAM, I'd still be using it.

[Eth]

What do you use 12GB of RAM for?

[fossaman]

12 Gigs? I wish I had that kind of memory for fractal renders...when you're rendering a 12000x4800 image the memory is really a limiting factor to how fast you can go.

I've been rather miffed at my computer for quite some time now. It likes to restart itself, without any error logs or blue screen or anything. Dell tells me it's the BIOS and that there's going to be a new version out 'real soon now' (to paraphrase).

[Rider]

Eww dude... you got a Dell...

[fossaman]

So what's the 'good' computer brand, then? As far as I can tell they all suck, and I don't have the patience or know-how to build my own.