Moderate success!

I have complained, to all who would listen, about my computer troubles over the last few months. It has been most annoying and interfered with my gaming, er blogging. So I thought I'd take some time to describe what has been going on.

A few years back, I invested in a new system. Althon 3500+, MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum (Nforce3 250 Ultra chipset), OCZ PC3500EL (2x512 MB match pair), 250 GB Seagate HD (7200.8 SATA interface), DVD+/-R CD-RW/R, Antec Sonata case, Antec TruePower 480 PS, BFG 6800GT OC. At the time, pretty cutting edge without breaking the bank. In recent months, instability has crept in. At first, I thought it was something with the North Bridge - specifically the fan on it. The AGP slot goes right over the fan and 6800 GT is known for its prodigious heat production. This suspicion was later confirmed when the fan started making noise. Being lazy, I just let it be with blue-screens and lock-ups happening frequently.

Then the video card failed. Streaks of random colour appeared across the display. I must take action - no one can use the computer like this! I called BFG, who have a life-time warranty on their products. They determined, over the phone, that the RAM on the video card had an issue and I would have to send it back. They gave me an RMA number and I sent it back. They have excellent tech support, when you can get through, btw. Concurrently, I ordered a new heatsink/fan combo for my north bridge and some fresh thermal grease. Then I pulled my MSI Ti4200GT from my old machine to continue hobbling along. One can't be entirely without the Inter-weeb, don cha ya know.

The new parts and the replacement card arrived a week or so later. I order a Vantec VGA/chipset kit. The heatsink/fan combo was intended for older video cards to replace a passive heatsink with a copper-based one and integrated fan. My motherboard used the same fan/heatsink layout so this would be a drop-in replacement. Unfortuneately, I had to remove my motherboard to pop the retention pins out from underneath. The first thing I noticed was that the original heatsink/fan was so light - barely any metal at all! That and the reason the fan wasn't working was because the intake fins were clogged with dust. Ugh. The replacement heatsink/fan was copper and had some heft to it so I just made a mental note to clean that out every month or so. Replaced the motherboard, swapped in my cooling tower heatsink (a Thermaltake Silent Tower) and the replacement 6800GT. Everything fired up nicely, much much cooler than before, but the machine locked up hard when XP was started. Eventually tracked it down to the replacement card - it worked fine in VGA mode (during boot, in Windows XP Safe Mode) but as soon as the drivers tried to initialize it, the entire machine locked up hard. I swapped in the old Ti4200GT and away we went. The random lockups are done!

But they weren't or course. The problems that I attributed to heat weren't really the cause of all the problems. I finally fired up UBCD (Universal Boot CD) with memtest86+ and quickly discovered that one of the OCZ modules was producing constant errors. I swapped the locations to see if it was a motherboard issue, but the problem moved to the other bank. So off I went to get some replacement memory. I was tempted to get more RAM - move to 2 GB from 1 GB, but money reality really was suggesting that I should do a simple replacement. The best local price I saw was about $39 for a single 512MB stick, and I intended to buy two to fully replace what I had. I ended up going to KoolComputers (Wharncliffe store) and was surprised when the store clerk dug up some OCZ modules! I said that I had a matched pair of OCZ that developed a prolem and she indicated that they deal with OCZ all the time. If I wanted to use the lifetime warranty on the OCZ modules they would be able to do it on my behalf. Sounded good, but I needed something now. The replacement modules were slightly lower spec (PC3200 vs PC3500) but they had the nice heatspreaders and were $49 each! Awesome. Went home and ran them through memtestx86+ again, with no errors. So it has been half a day and so far the reliability has been high. I'm hoping that's the source of the reliability issues. Next up, performance!

That leads right back to the 6800 GT. I had spent 28 minutes on hold with BFG waiting for an operator. Especially infuriating was the point 5 minutes in when the system informed me that it would be about 3 minutes until the next call. After waiting an additional 20, I hung up and called back. That time the voice said 16 minutes. Since I didn't want to wait until next week, I left to go get my replacement RAM. I called back on return and got through immediately. The tech listened to my description of the problem and said that I'd need to send it back. That was okay - I expected that. What I didn't expect was the "Since the card we sent you was defective, we'll send you a label so you don't have to pay to send it back." Awesome again! The call was done in 11 minutes, punctuated with several minutes silence while the tech consulted various things. I look forward to the next round with the video card.

This brings me to my experiences with BFG Tech support. I have been the guy answering the phone before and I've called other tech support lines, although very rarely. The BFG support line has been the best I've experienced, for one main reason - they listen to what you say first and then figure out the next step. When they ask what the problem is, I summarize the problem and describe what I did to fix it. This is usually enough for the tech to determine that I've done all the simple things (reboot, try new drivers, tighten connections etc etc) and more complex things (replace card with a known good card and what happens). This last call and the call where I sent back my original card were excellent examples. They listened and when I was done, the first words were "well, sounds like you have a defective card, we'll set you up with an RMA." I was so pleased that I wasn't told "so let's try using the latest drivers" or some-such.

Anyway, all you people (okay, the one guy who reads my blog on occasion) have been treated to an extra long edition. I will try for the "more often, less long" philosophy in the future, but I've been starved of writing entries of late.