Been gone a while

[hansolo77]

So there I was, working on my computer.  Our cat sneaks behind my TV and steps on the power cord to my computer, unplugging it.  The computer instantly lost power, the cord/power supply sparked, the cat jumped 6 feet in the air and took off.  I tried to reconnect the power and turn the computer back on... nothing.  The computer was doing this power cycle deal where it would come on for a half second then power off again then on again for a half second then off again.  I tried all the tricks, got to the point where I only had the power supply, cpu, and 1 stick of ram, and the system would boot..  But that was it.  I could get it to post, but then crash Windows during start up.  Not sure what's up with that.  I even tried using my server's backup to restore the hard drive, and nothing.  The restore worked, but the system was still not working.  As it turns out, the power supply died and was only partially working, 3 out of the 4 sticks of ram were fried, and I seem to have gotten a boot sector virus some time ago that the backups still had.  I never really turn my computer off, it goes into standby, so I have no idea how long I've had the virus, but it's un-salvageable. 

I've spent the last week or so spending ALL my savings to rebuild a new computer.  New case (because the old one was rusting out and had that nasty white stain from the fire on it), New Motherboard (AsRock Fatal1ty Z370 Gaming K6), New CPU (Intel i7 8086 Limited Edition), New RAM (16gb DDR4 GSkill FlareX).  I also grabbed 4 Noctua NF-F12 120mm PWM fans.  Then this week's paycheck went to a new hard drive, Samsung 970 Pro 512gb NVME SSD, and a new power supply (Corsair TX750M).  I've never played with a NVME drive before.  It's pretty cool.  Haven't really noticed any performance improvements, but I'm still just working on getting things back up and running.

I've reinstalled Windows 7.  I tried to go with Windows 10, but found out that the OS is incompatible with Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials (so I can get backups working).  Spent a couple of days trying out all solutions I could find through Google, Microsoft, etc.  Just gave up.  Windows 7 struggled to install because of the NVME, there were no such devices when it first came out, so it didn't know it existed.  Had to come up with a way to modify the install by building a bootable USB flash stick with preinstalled generic NVME drivers.  All good now.  Then I spent a day getting all the Windows updates.  Slowly but surely I'm getting there!

Anyway, I wanted to apologize for my absence and lack of High Score moderations.  Speaking of which.. @Adultery I tried to send you a PM.  I forgot the server password and can't send DB updates from the DBM.  Any chance you see this and can help me out?  Do I need a reset, or maybe you can just tell me what it was?  The PM system here said you weren't able to receive messages.

[Draco1962]

Edit your thread title @Adultery to flag the post to his attention.

[tthurman]

Nice machine han!

[hansolo77]

1 hour ago, Draco1962 said:

Edit your thread title @Adultery to flag the post to his attention.

Thanks.  I thought something was weird with that.

[RIP-Felix]

What you rockin for graphics?