New PC

So I finally got all my parts for my new PC. I started to build it early this week, but I should’ve really waited for the weekend as I really didn’t have time this week to mess with it. You’ve probably noticed that I’ve been on and off AIM a lot as I install and reboot and tinker around with it. I was contemplating either to install Vista or XP, and decided to go with XP for now as driver support for Vista isn’t all that great yet and I have a bunch of programs I don’t know if they’ll run in Vista or not. As a media center PC that I don’t use mostly other than to watch media, Vista is awesome. But for my main box, I decided to stick with XP for now.

My PC now consists of:

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 2.13GHz
• Abit IL9 Pro Motherboard
• Asus Radeon EAX1600PRO Silent X1600PRO 256MB
• Kingston 2 x 1GB DDR2 PC5400 SDRAM
• Seagate SATAII 500GB Hard Drive
• LG GSA-H42N-BK 18x DVD Burner
• Lite-On 48x CD Burner
• Ultra V Series 500W Power Supply

A pretty simple machine. Motherboard contains 5.1 surround sound + digital and optical ports. It also has a gigabit ethernet port so I didn’t need to buy another one. So far, I’ve been pretty happy with it. However, I have noticed that I’ve been getting flickers with this CPU, motherboard, graphics card combination. When I launch a video, the moment right before the video starts playing, I see these funky colors/lines for a split second. Also, sometimes I see a line flash out of nowhere. I’m pretty sure it’s related to the video card.

Initially I thought I had a bad video card so I contacted Newegg and Asus support. However, I decided to see if this problem repros on my MCE box. Indeed it does. It’s even running Vista, so it’s not exactly the same setup. Derek suggested I try upgrading to ATI’s newest drivers. I had been using the drivers provided on Asus’ download site and they’ve worked well for the most part. I installed the newest drivers: Catalyst 7.3 onto both boxes and the flickering still reproed. I’ll need to ask Xyon if he seems something similar as he has the same video card I have.

Also noted by Derek is the fact that these new Catalyst drivers have a problem with our Vizio 47″ LCD TV. For some reason, it overscans or underscans. In my case, you see a black border around my screen about 1″ thick. I downgraded it to Catalyst 7.1 and the overscanning still existed. Finally downgraded to 8.31 (not exactly sure how the number system worked before 7.1) and the overscanning problem went away.

I’ve also had another flickering problem with Quicken 2007. When it does any sort of animation, my screen jitters like crazy. At first I thought it was related to these other video card problems I’ve been having. However, a quick search online revealed this thread: Screen Flickering. Apparently there’s a problem with Quicken and ipoint.exe. ipoint.exe is the Microsoft IntelliPoint software that you install for your mouse that provides it with the magnify and instant viewer functionality. I actually thought the instant viewer was nice and was sort of a hacky version of expose. Apparently when Microsoft rolled out version 6.0 of ipoint.exe, Quicken’s been having problems with this massive amount of flickering. With ipoint.exe killed, if you look very closely, the flickering still occurs, but at a much quicker pace. I think they just have a very unoptimized way of redrawing their entire window.

As for my old parts, I was planning to build another file server. I have 3 Seagate SATAII 500GB drives that I purchased just for this. However, it hit me when I was installing my new PC that my current motherboard didn’t support SATA. I searched online. There are some SATA I PCI cards that support upto 4 SATA devices, but PCI cards can only support upto 2 devcies if you want SATA II. They were about $40 each and that’s an additional $80. The I tried searching for motherboard that support Socket-A and had SATA II connectors. My previous CPU was a AMD Sempron 2800+. On Newegg, they only carry 4 socket-A motherboards and none of them have SATA connectors. So I thought I might as well wait for the next Fry’s CPU+Motherboard combo for $79 or lower and as long as it has 4 SATA connectors, I’d be fine.

Honestly, it’s been a pretty bad week for me. But that’s a story for a later day.