Solving one problem after another….

So, all the parts that I ordered 2 weeks ago arrived. And I put them in. And it has seemed like there has been one problem after another….

So last week, I put the new hard drive in and the other SSD. The hard drive wasn’t the issue at the time. Except for the fact that I knocked a couple of power cables looses, and when I turn the computer on I was two drives short. So I had to take the tower apart to plug them back in. And to install the SSD, since the motherboard’s design has a heatsink that covers them both, I had to take off my expansion cards to install it (not really that big of an issue as it was just a video card and my tv tuner). And M2 screws are tiny. Then came the cpu cooler (the ‘new’ cpu hadn’t arrived yet). I gave up on it. With the way it was designed, I figured the risk was too great that I would crack or damage my motherboard before I got it on….

EDIT: right after I gave up in this CPU cooler, I ordered a cheap one from Rosewill, which shipped from Newegg. I thought it was going to be a challenge to install it, but it turned out to be almost as easy as the Wraith Prism. And as an added bonus, my ‘new’ Ryzen 7 3800X is about 20 degrees cooler now. It doesn’t have an RGB set up like the other one, but I don’t need it. It does have a blue led on it, so I can see if it’s working.

So this week, I got the processor I ordered. Relatively quick and painless install. And then I turned the tower back on. Had to make a change in the BIOS. Ended up having to flash a new BIOS. But I finally got the processor installed. Then I came time to install Windows 10. So I put the tower back in its place, untangling the rat’s nest of usb cables. Plugged in the usb flash drive to install Windows, and when I selected the drive, I get another error.This one was easy. After a simple google search, I just pulled out the flash drive and plugged it back in, and I was able to proceed. The rest of the windows install was relatively quiet, except when it came time to set the account up. This time instead of entering your Microsoft credentials, or selecting an offline account (which is what I prefer, then I’ll sign in with my Microsoft account), it was asking for my homedreams.com.au account credentials. Which I obviously didn’t have. Solution: start the software installation over, but this time, unplug the network cable and once you get your offline account set up, then plug it back in.

The last problem I’ve so far was when I was installing my game controllers. I just needed to plug the USB hub into a different port…..

The moral of the story is that the more you upgrade your computer, the more likely you’re going to break it…