Monday, March 14, 2016

New Computer

W00T! It's awesome!

So, we got his CPU yesterday just before he had to work. He got off work around midnight, but spent his breaks getting stuff started, and looking at the manuals. After he got off work, I helped him with his computer a bit before taking apart my temporary desktop. I pulled the wires off and undid the screws for the Hard Drive and Video Card. Not him, me. :)

We put my Hard Drive (500GB) and Video Card (nVidia GTX 450) in his old case. Here's what's new and awesome:

- The front USB ports actually work (my old case, the front usb ports had a habit of stopping every 15ish minutes)
-It has water cooling for the CPU (quieter than my old computer, only fan you can hear now is the video card)
-It has a 6-core processor (so I can see your camera while streaming mine, and I don't have to exit dropbox or firefox to do so)
-It has 8 GB of RAM (honestly I don't use much over 2, but it's nice to have the extra so I don't have to upgrade so soon)

What stays the same, but is still awesome (aside from the already listed HD and GC)?

-Two monitors (1600x900 and 1280x1024)
-Washable Keyboard
-Fairly old gaming mouse (so I don't have to worry about ruining it with pussy juice, but still have the scrolling buttons by the wheel and the back/forward thumb buttons)

Gentlemen, I give you my "new" computer! What should I call it? Suggestions in the comments!

Edited to add the pics. Please note: left click on the picture and click "view image" if all you see is an icon. Also, I put them in the public camming google drive folder, so you can see them there.


Friday, March 11, 2016

The Computer Saga

Hey guys!

As I posted on twitter, my desktop died the other day. I figured it might be useful for you all to know exactly what is going on with everything.

First, some background. My partner and I have always been in agreement that he needs a better computer than I do. I'm not going to justify why this is so to you guys, just know that it is the truth. He needs more processing power, more ram, better graphics, and more hard drive space than I do. Any time my needs in this go up, his have gone up three times previously.

Back in 2010, he made his dream gaming computer. About six months later (early 2011), upgrades came out, and he made another one, and gave me his gaming computer. That is the desktop I've been using. So it dying now was not entirely unexpected. Looking at things, we think the power supply went bad and killed it. There might be an issue with the motherboard as well.

In June 2015, I turned 30. My dad wanted to do something special for such a "landmark" birthday, so he got me an ASUS ROG laptop. For awhile, I was letting someone else use the desktop, and was using the laptop for everything. When I got the desktop back, I set it up for gaming-only, keeping the laptop for camming. Then I realized that the desktop would work better for camming, since I take the laptop places where kids can see. So I refreshed Windows 10 on both, and did the setup. That was... a couple weeks ago I think?

My desktop's hard drives have switched out a few times. Most recently, it had an 500 GB and an 80 GB hard drive. I had Windows installed on the bigger hard drive, and Linux installed on the smaller one. When I initially installed Windows, I installed it as Windows 8 and upgraded to Windows 10. When I installed Windows 8, it gave me the option to put the boot partition on the 80 GB drive. Here's where I'm unsure. I think I told it no, but it's possible I told it to do so since I knew I was doing the dual boot thing. I could've sworn I made it so that windows wouldn't need both hard drives though.

If you've been following, we had two gaming desktops from 2010/2011, one gaming laptop from last summer. There are also multiple standard desktops. So when my desktop died, we decided to move the video card and the Windows hard drive into one of the other unused desktops. However, I needed both hard drives. I didn't want to need both hard drives. We have a fourth computer that's set up as a linux box with profiles for each of us to play with. I got tired of windows rebooting on me while I was in the kitchen on breaks and me coming back to Linux loading up because that's what it does if I'm not here to press the button quickly enough when it gets to the screen where I choose which operating system to use.

Yesterday, we went to a computer store and bought most of what my partner needs to build himself a new gaming computer (he's porting his current hard drive and current video cards over, and they were out of the CPU he wanted, so we had to get that online). He's keeping his current video cards (yes, two of them, for his 4 monitor setup), and hard drive(s? unsure). But, that leaves his old computer which is not quite as old as my old computer, and has better capabilities than anything except my laptop. So, when his CPU gets here in about a week, he's going to put together his new computer, and then when we have a day off together, we put my video card and hard drive in his old computer which then becomes my new computer. ^_^

In the meantime, my CPU and RAM capabilities are kinda gimped. What does this mean for you? It means that any time I can't really pull up youtube videos while camming. I can't go to any links. I can't look up obscure facts. It also means that if you do cam2cam with me, my camera might get a little choppy just from having your camera on my screen. It means the first couple seconds of a show the camera is likely to be a little choppy. It means that my video quality might suffer a little. I'm sorry about this. It is very temporary.

So, I'm back on today. I'm still working out what my days off will be from now on x.x I'm thinking half a day Saturday, taking Thursday off, and then a random half day that will change weekly depending on when I need it.