Oh technology has marched on and I, the poor student, was left behind.

That is until recently. And i have to admit, updating this godforsaken pillar in my daily life has been about as easy as gouging your own eyes out with a curly straw. Short of fire shooting out of the case and burning my house down, every problem has been ostensibly met with a more annoying problem.

I bought the motherboard and processor from NCIX during their boxing day sales. It was a good deal at the time but whatever I saved in money I spent in more money and a boiling sense of rage against technology. The boards came and it was good. When I finally got around to installing them in my current system I came across a problem. The RAM wouldn't fit. At this point I began to see the traces of deeply dug trench war between me and the computer. As all nemesis need names you can hate I started to see this as my own personal Cerebus. Keeping me in misery and bondage.

However, spirits were high and I still had some money saved so I swapped my whole system back out, went once again to NCIX, grabbed some new RAM and waited.

It's at this point that I think I should mention how much time it takes to actually get anything from these guys. Don't bother getting the fast shipping. When they come they'll swoop in in mid-afternoon when no one could possibly be around to sign for anything and leave you a mocking tab of paper saying 'Sorry we missed you'!

You will take no comfort in this empty condolence.

To actually receive said package you have to wait for work to end, then find some way of getting out to an area where no busses run and which is deadlocked traffic from 4:30 to 6 before 5:45. You wait in traffic and get cut off by everyone who lives out in CBS who have been hardened into black little husks by years of making this same shitty trip, kind of like March of the Penguins only if it were made by old jerks and bitches in cars that on first glance look way too big until you notice that the cars have to fit around the heart attack at the wheel. You have to do this whenever you make a voyage to Puralator and when you finally get your package you feel little joy for having had to deaden yourself to the world just to get it.

Anyway...

RAM came in and it fit nicely in my board with a satisfying click that you get from solving a puzzle or take a great picture. Good feelings filled me and I went about the annoying task of once again removing my old motherboard and putting this new one in. Eventually it was done. I started to get excited again, it had been about two weeks now but I was going to have my spoils soon.

Or not.

See, the thing that I realized having not made any major computer purchases in the past year or two is that there were a lot of parts that came out that had managed to make a whole new set of cables and ports the standard. My old board had an IDE ribbon, took DDR RAM and had an AGP socket for the graphics card and had a 20 pin ATX power supply and . New boards, like the one I have have a new drive connection (SATA), new RAM slots (DDR2 - EXTRA PINS SO YOU GOTTA BUY ME!) new graphics card slot (PCI-E) and needs more power (ATX 24 pin). I had none of this so off I went to buy a new Power supply.

It was a surprisingly easy process that. I went to a local store (Boom IT), grabbed a new PSU and plugged it in. If you think that that was the end of it, .... no. To cut this short I spent all evening last night finding BIOS revisions, troubleshooting a potential RAM issue and fucking around with my internal drives until now...NOW... I'm finally able to do a reinstall of windows. It looks promising so far but I know Cerebus and he is a vengeful bastard. It appears to have stalled already, which is a problem that I'm really going to have to figure out sometime, but as long as I can get a desktop tonight i'll be happy...ish.

If I can't then I think it'll be time for me to get a big funny hat and to churn butter for the rest of my life.