I'm great with computers. Case in point finally solving a problem I've had after putting it to the back of my mind for the last four years...and I'm the one who built my PC in the first place!
(We're about to get a little technical here, brace yourself.)
THE PERCEIVED PROBLEM - NOT ENOUGH SATA TO GO AROUND
My tax return is on its way soon and I was thinking of using some of it to upgrade my writing/gaming/video/bit of everything. Something a little more modern than a 1150 socket with my hard working I5 4460. Something with more than four sata ports for my collection of hard drives and still have a spare for the tower's various readouts and one for the DVD player.
Because I only have four with this motherboard (MSI B85M-E45) even though the box said six were there and so did the manual. That must have been a misprint because I found four, gave up looking for the mysteriously disappeared other two and just swapped things out if I needed to. Need to access the DVD drive? Well we'll just have to open the case, disconnect a drive and connect up the drive then do the reverse when I wanted to play any games on that now disconnected drive.
I've been doing this for FOUR YEARS now and only now when I'm thinking of a completely new motherboard, have I actually spent any time investigating where the other two actually went. Turns out they were there all along:
Yes the RX570 hogging the case space doesn't help but if we take a closer look, there they are. It's the black box thing right there. It's never occurred to me that they would be on their side and not facing up like the other four!
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| I've confused this for some kind of chip/diode/processor thing for years now |
Sure they're not as high speed as the other four but who cares? The bloody things exist and I've managed to miss them for four years and counting.
(I also learnt the 4460 has onboard graphics today, the more you know!)
THANKFULLY I DON'T CHARGE MYSELF FOR MY OWN WORK
So after resisting the urge to give myself a clothesline from hell, I got to replugging everything in so it wasn't so much of a rats nest (still is though) and get down to using these new found ports.
I also got to repairing the plug for the front USB, which I managed to crush roughly a year back when moving things about. Now if you bend the pins back ever so slowly (I used a pen knife and strong magnification for this) with a bit of luck you can get them standing straight again and not being so rough with the plug, it's up and working again, joy!
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| From this.. |
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| To this! |
OF COURSE NOTHING EVER WORKS THE FIRST TIME AROUND..
Installing my RX570 the first time was a pain as it took quite a while to come to terms with my home system. I discovered that you add new hardware one at a time and make sure there's an air of peace and contentment with the latest system before you attempt cramming something else in there.
Now of course taking it out today to give me more room to work with, resulted in it not working when I went back. Of course, why wouldn't it work again after a brief jaunt away.
Let's not beat you to death with the finer details here, suffice to say I tried a few things
-Creative swearing
-Swapping ram sticks around
-Unplugging and replugging anything and everything
-Resetting the CMOS
-Let it sit for a while
-Have dinner, come back and swear at it some more
-Poke around in the Bios to find anything obvious (nothing obvious there)
-Reinstall MSI Live Update again (I forgot to put this back when I changed my hard drive) and got it to update a few things
Eventually only one thing worked and that was using Display Driver Uninstaller by Guru3d. I got it to clear everything it could find by choosing the option CLEAN AND SHUTDOWN. This cleans the state and then turns off your PC so you can install your new gpu (or in my case my current one) and wouldn't you know it? It started right up happily and waited patiently while I got it the freshest drivers on the market today. It's sitting in its spot happily while I type this and amazingly nothing has started smoking, yet.
Now I have all working drive, a working DVD drive, the case still lights up AND the GPU seems happy. Well until the next time I try fixing things or wondering where missing pieces have ended up..
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