Day 5

6:33 p.m.

So it's taken me about one day to setup and re-install most everything and it is worth it. Example, one operation in Photoshop that had been taking between 15 & 20 minutes to complete now takes about 45 seconds. I've spoken with the guy at Velocity Micro and told him how I attached the fan; and he advised me to leave the machine on all night; and he would call me in the morning to help me check the pc's temperature. Nice guy. If it isn't right, they'll have to send over a technician to change the heat sink and the fan. He also mentioned that the fan I had received was actually an upgrade they threw in.

* * *
Lewis & Clark didn't need to write in reverse order. I am definitely going to buy something like Ghost so that I have a backup of the main drive with all the stuff installed. The main hang-up right now is finding all the serial numbers for stuff I use, i.e. plug-ins et. cetera. The external drive enclosure has turned out to be very useful as I just popped out the drives from the old p.c. and popped them (like toast) into the enclosure to get stuff I needed. I think I'm going to need one more enclosure before this journey is over. But the drivers I had to look for. The passwords, the serial numbers -- egads and zooks. But the pc is humming along now with a nice blue light shining from the fan like a full moon over the Missouri.

I don't know the purpose, other than cosmetics of the blue fan light - unless it's to zap those darned mosquites. The biggest problem the Lewis & Clark expedition have had so far are:
Malaria (though they didn't call it that); and various veneral diseases (which they all had). They didn't know the cause of the former being those pesky mosquites; and I'm not sure whether they knew the 'cause of the 2nd disease, though they must have had some idea.
***

After a sleepless night, I woke up at 5 a.m. to take another look at the new PC. I was thinking of Lewis and Clark and all the troubles they went through to cross into the unknown and I thought I could take a lesson from Lewis and attempt to make the repairs, or at least understand the problem with the new technology.

I turned the newe p.c. on it's side and studyied the problem. The fan, which I think should have been attached with 4 screws, didn't have any screws to hold it in, and one screw was rattling around. I found that screw and was able to reattach the fan to the heate sinke & cetera. (If you've ever read 18th century blogs, you'll see the phrase & cetera a lot, along with & c.)

I'm not sure that either Lewis or Clark could spell the other guys' name the same way twice.

Anyway, I found a second screw and so the fan is attached with two screws (until I can find 2 more) and is fine.

Other observations: the case is okay, but not as easy to keep clean as the old Dell case; plus this one is not the easy-open version. I could have gotten the easy-open version but it was a few dollars more.

The inside of this is just very nicely wired. Easier to get to things than with the Dell. Since everything is made from off-the-shelf stuff, you get all the extras from the off-the-shelf pieces which may be useful at some point.

As far as how fast or slow the new pc is - I don't have any idea yet. I still need to pull some hard drives and cards from the old pc and put them into the new one; then drivers, photoshop & cetera.

As far as day five without cigs go - although the night was weird and I felt sort of wide awake - I did wake this morning feeling somewhat normal for the first time since stopping. Somewhat normal means that I didn't feel like I had to hold onto the handrail going down the stairs, and the thought of attacking the computer setup didn't send me into a frenzy.

Given that I stopped on New Years Day Morning - there must be others out there who are going through the exact same thing. Stay with it if you can.