It's always the little things...

by Kristopher Moreau
(Boston, MA)

Problems encountered and solved (skip to bolded statements for these solutions):

1. Motherboard shorted out and started smoking at power up.
2. Moved hard drive from old system to new without formatting.

I’ve wanted to build my own computer since the early 90s. While I’ve upgraded RAM, expansion cards, optical drives, hard drives, etc, I’ve just never gotten around to building one from the ground up. Finally this year when I decided to upgrade my PC, I decided to just build my own. I scoured the internet reading reviews and finally decided on the following for my build:

Case: Tricod 9003 500w power supply
Motherboard: Asus P5N-D
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad 9550
Memory: 8GB 800MHZ Generic OEM
Cooler: Scythe Ninja 2
Video Card: Geforce 9800GT 1GB DDR3
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit

I pulled my hard drives, optical drives, floppy drive, and media card reader from my old Dell XPS 410. I read the guides and expected to finish my build in an evening, but it ended up taking about a week.

The last of my parts arrived on a Tuesday and as soon as I got home from work, I started putting the pieces together. I read a lot of guides which suggested installing the cooler on the motherboard outside of the case and then installing the motherboard into the case. This proved to be a disaster as it made it extremely difficult to maneuver to get the other components hooked into the motherboard. I ended up with several small cuts on my hands but I finally got everything hooked up and I switched it on. Sparks and smoke from the motherboard. I turned everything off and bought a new motherboard.

New Motherboard: Asus P5Q-SE Plus

Before starting over, I decided to go over some how to install motherboard guides and I realized I had made a horrible mistake. I had screwed the motherboard directly into the case instead of using the included brass standoffs. So I moved everything to the new motherboard and used the standoffs this time and turned everything on. It powered up and booted to bios. So I installed the drives and tried to boot windows.


Blue Screen of Death.

Of course, I knew that I should have backed up my data and reformatted my hard drive and reinstalled windows on the new build, but maybe this will help some other reckless people like me. I put in my Windows DVD and attempted a repair install, but it was no good. So I decided to reinstall windows. Once again like an idiot, I didn’t back up my data but, I was able to save it.

Here’s How:

I booted to my windows DVD and reinstalled windows without formatting the hard drive. After going through the install Windows displayed a message that a previous version of windows had been found and all files were stored in a folder named windows.old.

All of my files were there including the program files folder and windows folder. I had to reinstall my programs, but all of the data was there, So for example to get back my BioShock save games, I reinstalled BioShock then moved my save games from windows.old to the appropriate place in my new windows install. For Thunderbird, I reinstalled it and moved the contents of my default user profile to the new default user profile.

Note for Thunderbird: I had to go through the initial account set up so thunderbird would generate a user profile and instead of replacing the file outright, I had to replace just the contents of the file.

I was worried that I would have to call Microsoft to reactivate windows, but it activated fine over the internet. I’m not sure this would have worked as well if I had used the version of windows that came with my Dell, but I had purchased a retail version of Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit and it worked fine.