Christmas time is always such a shitty time, it seems. Im convinced its New York.
A year ago, a week before Christmas, my Grandmother passed on. It made Christmas difficult. There is no joy when a loved one dies, no matter where you look for it. It is not to be found. This year, the day before Christmas, our dog, Sheba, came down with an insane fever. Christmas Eve, she was taken to a vet, who advised we should remove her ovaries. Dad thought the man was a con artist, as she was eating snow that had road salt in it, and her symptoms seemed like those of someone poisoned by the sodium and potassium chlorides. Christmas day, she was doing better, and even ate. The day after however she fell worse, and we took her to a different vet, who confirmed that she had a disease of the ovaries that causes them to inflame, and sometimes rupture. We were lucky they didnt. She had emergency surgery that saved her life, but the holiday was tense.
Then, sadly, just days before new years, the son of friends of the family was struck and killed by a van on Long Island, where he lived. The guy driving was a volunteer firefighter, so of course he got no ticket, no blame whatsoever. The boy was 18 years old, and his life ended in a day. He had severe head trauma. His parents are devastated, as they should and would be. It was truly a sad sad thing.
I cannot imagine the grief one must feel when they have to bury their child.
That night, too, was my cousin’s sweet sixteen. She looked very pretty in her dress, and I think that that night was the most she had ever spoken with me. Odd how Ive known her since she was born, but she was always so shy she would never speak to me.
We didnt get home until 3am that night. I came home and found that my freshly installed Thermaltake liquid cooling kit had failed. Yep. After being installed for only about 50 hours, the pump leaked into itself and shorted out. The voltage shock told the PSU to shut down. My Motherboard, earlier that day had failed to update its BIOS correctly, and when it shorted out and powered down, was left without a brain.
Long story short, my PC died while I was at a funeral.
But from destruction comes creation. Expensively of course. I’ve purchased a new motherboard and processor, ram, heatsink and PSU. Building a new Intel Core i7 system using the 920 Nehalem chip. The board Im buying is from eVGA. Ive been reading a lot, and theirs seem to be the best boards. However they are nVidia fanboys at eVGA. They had no boards that suported ATi’s CrossfireX platform. Since I have a 3870, and like that I can pay a lot less money for ATi cards than I can for nVidias and get really good performance, this had always been a point of apprehension. Fortunately, the new i7’s use the new Intel X58 chipset, which natively supports both SLi and CrossfireX. I was very happy to read that. It helped me decide. Even though I am spending nearly a grand on this new setup, it should be futureproof for atleast 3 new technology cycles.
Lessons learned:
- Holidays are a time where bad things always seem to happen.
- Good people have bad things happen to them far too often.
- Life is so very random. Theres no order, no accountability, no method to who lives and who dies, or why.
- That is scary.
- Do not buy Thermaltake for liquid cooling purposes, unless you need to have an excuse to upgrade your current hardware.
- Liquid cooling is a great thing, it can keep your system very cool, and do it without making nearly any noise. But dont expect to have a decent system (even just a CPU loop) for under 200.00 US. If you do get something for less, expect it to fail, hard, and fast.
