Project Hayate - Prolonging the Inevitable - Part 1

Author’s Note: Forgive this preamble I promise that they’ll be juicy links and google page rank increases in Part 2.

After my October escapade in Boston – with a brief layover at Yon Reptile Campaign – Lifeâ„¢ decided to shine a ray of hope in my general direction, after Thanksgiving. However, quick to grant me access to enough income to pay rent, Lifeâ„¢ viciously raped my ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, and I was unable to use MPlayer to play movies, use GL to play games, or whatever else we non-Apple people do with our video cards. With a hole in my pocket called “month-to-month” Harmless lay infected with a Savage 2000 card that I bummed from a co-worker while working for JP Morgan Chase. Luckily I began a more permanent presence at Yon Reptile Campaign helping cope with a couple of rambunctious Windows servers, and so I can begin this tale of…

“Project Hayate - Prolonging the Inevitable Shaving of my Metaphorical Neckbeard, Part One”

After a few months of researching I decided that my best choice economically would be to go with an Intel Core 2 Duo 1.83ghz. However with the Intel price drop on April 22nd I, being the simple-minded consumer that economists & marketing analysts love, bought the new Intel Core 2 Duo e6420 2.13ghz instead. Not that I needed a 4mb cache anyway. I quickly found the Gigabyte 965p-DS3 as a relatively compatible motherboard for Linux, purchased 2gb of ddr2-800 from Corsair, a 250gb Western Digital SATA drive, and of course a video card, the XFX Nvidia GeForce 7900 GS PCI-E (so long ATI!). Although if I had more available funds it would have been best to purchase the latest and greatest of Nvidia 8xxx series, but alas that will have to wait.

I returned from my usual weekly business trip in a state of panic. FedEx no longer requires signature by default, and they had most likely left this precious package on my doorstep where no doubt Lifeâ„¢ would have snatched it away and into the hands of some bastard. Despite the 9:34am “delivery time” and confirmation of no package on my doorstep at 10:30am I came home to a package on my doorstep. My descent into emo would have to wait for another day.

I shut down Harmless for the last time, shed a tear of sorrow for the lost, and took its shell (and my BenQ DD DVD Writer :).

With surprising ease I slipped the new power supply and motherboard into the mid-tower case that once housed Harmless. I made sure to put on one drop of Arctic Silver Thermal Paste, and dabbed it evenly over the clean face of the Core 2.

It took a few minutes to learn the essentials of Socket LGA775, but I found it much easier than messing with those damn clips from Socket 478. I was amazed that the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Heatsink even fit in the case. It was a close fit, but damn that’s hot (no pun intended).

And the fan, that’s hotter. And fast forward to everything in the case.

… I stood flabbergasted. Was it really that easy? No, the hard part was yet to come – full of doubting Slackware, my sanity, aggravating search queries on Google for pages you knew existed, and fun kernel messages like the one to the right. The night was far from over. However I’ll spare you gentle readers until another episode.