"Dishing out Some Approval"

A couple of weeks ago I went back home to visit the parents and show my face play ‘who-wants-a-climbing-frame’ at St. Mary’s.  My other plan on this trip was to set my sister up with an old PC that we had lying around as a Media Centre in her room.  She had an HD TV, so setup shouldn’t’ve been too difficult.

Unfortunately upon waking up on Saturday morning, and trying to turn on my parent’s PC, the machine emitted a number of beeps and failed to display anything on screen.  Helpfully the internet concluded that the beep codes I was getting was related to memory or video (which is usually what’s up when your computer goes beep and doesn’t display a sausage [or anything else for that matter]) and removing the other PCI cards and unplugging the drives confirmed this.  Unplugging all the memory gave a different error, which narrowed it down to the graphics card, but unplugging it and replacing it with another similar card gave the same beeps…

It turns out that the PCI-Express port had decided it was going to stop working, which was annoying because it was the only PCI-E x16 slot on the board so it looked like a new motherboard was needed.  Thankfully, the board I had handed down to my parents was an Asus A8N5X, which happened to have a PCI-E 4x slot, with the back missing, so you could plug a full-width PCI-E x16 card in and get it working, just with a small performance loss that my parents aren’t really going to notice.  So Asus wins a Nick Pierce Seal of Approval for the provisioning of useful PCI-E 4x slots on their motherboards.

Once that issue was fixed I turned to my sister’s PC.  Unfortunately I hadn’t had the forward planning to have gotten everything together, but to get it working beautifully, I realised I’d need additional RAM, a new graphics card capable of HD and some HD cable.  A quick visit to PC World scuppered that plan when I found that they were planning to lighten my Dad of £40 for a metre of HD cable.  Almost reminds me of the ultimate student deal at Curry’s a few years ago.  According to amazon, a metre of HD cable is around 100g and the price of silver is about £520 per kilo, making HD cable from PC World only a little less valuable than its weight in silver.  Therefore PC World wins a Nick Pierce Seal of Disapproval for extortion.  And yes, it was at least half the price on the internet.