PC (forced ) Upgrade 2019 edition

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Winnow
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PC (forced ) Upgrade 2019 edition

Post by Winnow »

Thursday I returned from the shitter to find my PC completely shut down.

After several attempts to get it started again, it appeared to be the power supply but wasn't 100% sure. I rushed over to Best Buy before it closed to grab a 750 W Power supply, I got one with the fancy more reliable components, quiet, and 10 year warranty.

I STILL have the old Antec p180 (i think) case. It's just a shell with no remaining functional fans, and other broken things but it still houses my PC parts. I received a pretty deep cut on my finger from a sharp edge down around where the power supply goes while cleaning the dust bunnies. Thing bled for a few days but seems ok now.

I tried to spark up my PC again but nothing. So I removed my Nvidia 980ti card. The PC started but burst into flames...well not that dramatic but a USB 6x USB 3.0 card I had started smoking then caught on fire. I turned off the PC and removed that card. (On a side note, I found out today that my gaming headset connected to that card also was fried so ordered a wireless gaming headset)

So off to Best Buy again the next morning. I did some limited research on graphics cards and then bought the nVidia RTX 2070. It's a decent boost in performance from my 980ti (which was already plenty good for my needs at the moment) The card was $600. I checked Amazon and I had paid $659 for my 980ti back in 2016 so I guess that's my price level for graphics cards.

Installed the new RTX 2070 and my PC started up but, fuck me, my windows install was unrecoverable. I had to start from scratch with fresh install. I had no backups.

Windows 10: I had windows 10 installer already on a USB (otherwise I would have been screwed), I started to install but windows install kept crashing saying I needed all the files or something. I tried three time, using different USB ports etc. Fail. Now I was really thinking it was going to cost me a lot to get things up and running again. I tried installing windows 10 onto one of my 8TB spinning drives and it installed right away....so

Off to Best Buy a THIRD time to buy a new OS SSD. I considered 512GB SSD but went with a 1 TB Samsung 860. I have two other 2 TB SSDs but they had stuff on them that I want separate from my OS drive (for when shit like this happens).

I install new SSD and windows 10 installs fast.

Thankfully, all my games were installed on a 2TB SSD so after reinstalling steam, Blizzard Battlenet, Epic Games launcher, I was able to fairly easily reassociate my game folders with the launchers saving me like a half TB of downloads. I did lose all my bookmarks and game controller config settings. I also have plenty of other apps that need reinstalling and lost my Android emulator with all my games so had to set that up again and redownload those games.I took a full day but have PC reconfigured back to normal except for lost bookmarks that I'll get again slowly.

Cost of PC meltdown while taking a shit:

750W PSU: $109
RTX 2070: $599
1TB SSD: $149
Wireless Gaming Headset: $129

Total: $986 +tax

The positives are that everything I bought can be used in a full upgrade which would be mostly just motherboard, CPU and memory (probably a case) at this point.

Cost in my own time: a full 2 days of troubleshooting, buying, installing, configuring everything. Plus a bloody finger. It really helps to have a windows 10 installer on a spare USB thumb drive. You don't need product codes anymore unless you swap motherboard/cpu. Windows recognized my PC hardware (probably by unique motherboard/cpu identifiers)
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