AMD Phenom Phantom on Gigabyte Guts with no Glory

IMG_1666

According to documentation, you should just be able to socket replace your AMD Athlon (Socket AM2) with an AMD Phenom. Boot, and watch the bits fly. Well, theoretically.

In my Gigabyte’s case: this was not to be so. The smaller Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H (blah!) is in our Media Center PC. This combination has been working well in production for months.

Continuous beeps (longish) from the Power-on-self-test (POST) indicates either power, memory, motherboard or somesuch failure. The Gigabyte documentation is 7 lines long and 7 pages short on helping.

OK, reading the procedures on forums and stuff.

It’s not the power supply. I can swap out the Phenom and Athlon with the same “everything” and it boots.

The Gigabyte online specifications state that the 9600 Black Edition (BE) is supported with a recent BIOS update. My BIOS has been at this update for the last 2 months in anticipation of the Phenom processor.

In short, wait people. Or at least research a little more than I did. Colleagues report that ASUS motherboards are work OK.

Oh the joys of hardware.

Spot the Error

Recent 491 Scam email received at one of email addresses:

During our investigation and auditing in this Bank, my department came across a very huge sum of money belonging to one of our deceased customer who died on Feb 29th 2002 of a ghastly motor accident and the fund has been dormant in his account with this bank without any claim of the fund in our Custody either from his family or relation before our discovery to this development. Although personally..

Spot the error?

My Dream Machine in Three Acts

Can u make me a peecee nows?

After spending late 2007 writing about and building my own fast PC – I realised there was a larger place for the story to be told. But not here. It was time to go PC enthusiast over on Channel 10.

The most difficult piece to write was the overture. Knowing at which technical level to target the writing. Feedback is welcome.

x64 is a barrier that the PC industry is going to push through during 2008. Laptops with only 4Gb of RAM are a bit cheezy and limited.

The overture:

And the three acts:

  1. My Dream Machine: Planning
  2. My Dream Machine: Construction
  3. My Dream Machine: Tuning

 front-page

Next articles will be related to how I work on this machine. The old Toshiba craptop just isn’t cutting it anymore.

Good to be rid of writer’s block.

I To Do Therefore I Am?

Lucy in the Window

Personal organisational skills. I can not has. They left me some time ago.

Microsoft has released some research on the gender differences of To Do lists.

About 70% of people have a To Do list.

20% of males keep their To Do list in their head.

Mine is a combination of email (whatever is still in there needs to be done) and my head (flexible rearrangement) and calendars (so I know where and when I should be)

If I spent my time managing my time I’d have no time to do stuff. And I’ve decided never to be so busy and stressed that I’ve got to have pages full of things to do. Been there, done that. Others are better equipped to deal with myriads of lists of things to do, delegating, measuring and motivating. I do, not to do.

Enjoying life is not cross items off a list. Life is in the doing.