My main PC rig died today...

[Grall]

Put itself out to pastures as it was filling my place with an acrid smoke. Had to open the door to my apartment and flee outside for fifteen, twenty minutes to air the place out. Now it's totally stone dead. My theory is power supply gave out, but I don't know for sure.

Luckily I have a backup rig, my older i7-920-based PC, but it is showing signs of age unfortunately. It has been a bit unstable, but going on 5+ years, this might be understandable. Going to update the graphics driver after a HDD has finished formatting, hopefully that will fix the bluescreen and the driver reset I experienced while playing a bit of WoW.

Was on Skype with my mate as we was rolling Hordes across Ashran when PC died. First I thought power had gone out, so I told him I just experienced a power outage (smartphones are great! ), but seconds later I realized only the PC had gone cold and dark.

Not too fond to be back on a single Radeon HD 6970 with its howling reference design blower cooler. Thinking of trying to pull out the 290X out of my new rig and sticking it into this one, but it was such a puzzle fitting it into the case it is mounted in, I'm not in too big a hurry trying to remove it again...

 

[orangpelupa]

or its the motherboard. my pc dead with smoke when motherboard dead

 

[homerdog]

Most likely it was just the PSU. Mobo and maybe the RAM at worst. It's very, very rare for something like that to take out the CPU, GPU etc.

 

[Grall]

The PSU has been acting strangely for a while; when cold-booting my PC it would frequently shut off repeatedly, a few seconds after starting. A bunch of tries, and it would stay turned on. As long as I kept it running it would work fine. Was too lazy to do anything about it.

Now I've blown my backup rig clean, installed win10 on it, and was met with windows activation error 0xC004C003... Thank you microsoft. Gonna see if I can get the november update installed (need to reboot due to prior update first) so I can manually input my win7 pro key into this mother of an OS. God damned microsoft, fucking up at every opportunity... Seriously, they managed to make updates and new installations the most cumbersome ever. Un-fucking believable.

 

[BRiT]

So the real question is, what did you do to upset the PC Gaming Gods? Were you looking at a console system or console game with envy?

 

[Grall]

Ha! Wish it was that simple. I was worshipping the PC gaming gods while it happened. These things, they just happen.

Updated win10, input my old product key, but because microsoft thinks that win10 home is so fundamentally different to other win10 versions, it won't accept my win7 key, which was from ultimate edition. Fucksake is wrong with these people. Why can't they make this fucking thing upgrade itself from home to pro when you can upgrade from an entirely different OS to win10?

Really getting tired of this bullshit.

 

[homerdog]

That shit bothers me crazy. Why not make all the media the same and have the key determine which features get installed? Madness.

Since all the media I have is for Pro versions of Windows, if a friend needs to reinstall on their home PC I can't help them cause my discs won't work.

 

[orangpelupa]

@Grall hohoho I hope you finally able to activate without going through nightmare like me.

Btw Microsoft in w10 is weird

 

[orangpelupa]

Btw you can upgrade ultimate on top of home. Just do in place upgrade

 

[Grall]

Just do in place upgrade

How? Booting from the USB installer again?

 

[orangpelupa]

@Grall

From what I understand, you have valid windows 7 Ultimate but upgraded to window 10 home?

You can upgrade the windows 10 home to Ultimate or pro or anything higher than home.

1. Open the windows 10 ultimate iso on Explorer
2. Install.

If Microsoft has allowed direct activation from win 7 key, you can do it when it asked for key.

If it refuse to upgrade... You need to force it through registry

 

[Grall]

Got my main rig back home today. New graphics card to replace the one that blew; ASUS R9 390X DCII 8GB. Nice, nice...except, it WHINES.

A LOT.

Godfuck! It sounds like metal-on-metal contact at a distance, like if a lathe was grinding on a rod of steel or somesuch in the other room. It's not noise from a fan bearing; it follows GPU activity precisely. Holy crab is this annoying or what!

Never had a graphics card whine in such a way before. I think I had one long in the distant past make some slight noises (Geforce 3? Radeon 9800 Pro?), but nothing like THIS. AMG! And the place I bought it from (well, warranty replacement almost covered the purchase price, had to put in like €20 extra to cover the difference) doesn't carry these in stock ordinarily so I can't get it swapped right away either. Actually, I haven't even called them up yet to report on this and hear what the policy is on what technically isn't really a malfunction; might do it tomorrow.

Worst come to worst, I'll just swap GPUs between my old and new rig... It won't fix the whine, but at least I won't be without gaming power for several days if I can get them to replace this board, because this noise is just monstrously obnoxious.