Dead
Greetings to the literal dozens of person who visit Death’s Door Prods on any kind of regular basis. Belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year you. You may be wondering where the fuck we’ve been over the past 10 days, why the last Comics podcast and Let’s Watch were so late, and why we haven’t posted Movies 56 or the Let’s Watch for the Black Christmas remake. We made a post about this on the Facebook page but I just realized I never said anything on the site proper and some of you might not use Facebook, so I thought that I would come here to let you guys know what has been happening and where we went. I’m sure you were very worried.
About 10 days ago, BovieWan attempted to upgrade my computer. I had bought a new motherboard and processor from the TigerDirect.ca store here in scenic London, Ontario. I got a Gigabyte 970A-DS3P motherboard and an AMD FX-6350 Six Core processor for anyone interested. I installed the processor in the motherboard just fine and we got around to setting it up in the case (a Thermaltake Commander Mid-tower case, again for anyone interested). We got the RAM, graphics card, disc drive, and HDD all installed and everything looked great. Then we started putting in the power supply and hooking everything up to the case itself. Here’s where things went south.
Somewhere along the path of plugging the PSU into everything, I plugged the wrong thing into the wrong port on the mobo. I believe it was one of the floppy connector things on the Molex plug to the output fan on the back of the case and I plugged that into a port on the mobo that said “Fan” on it or something, I don’t know. They guys at the TigerDirect.ca weren’t very clear when I brought it in for them to fix and then all the techs saw the plug and were like, “Oh fuck, dude. What the hell did you do?”
Anyway, so I plugged the wrong things and thought everything was peachy keen. Then I tried to turn it on. The LEDs in the fans lit up and spun for less than a second then everything turned off again. I thought that was weird so I tried it again. That’s when smoke started pouring out of it and started to freak the balls out. We unplugged everything, cracked the bitch back open and started sniffing everything to see where the smoke came from. We tried detaching everything from the mobo and it all came out fine, except for the CPU which had fused to the heat sink and was yanked right out of the fucking locked socket along with the heat sink. So we figured that this CPU was fucked, and tried it with the other one I had from my old mobo. Plugged it in and nothing.
So to TigerDirect.ca I flew with the help of my father (thanks, Dad) to see what the fuck had gone wrong. They very nondescriptly told me about the plug thing, said my PSU was scrapped gave me its corpse, and said that they needed to run diagnostics on the whole damn thing to see what got fried. My father paid for the diagnostics (thanks again, Dad).
Oddly enough, my computer burning out meant that Christmas came early. That is to say, our Christmas break, which we take every year during the last two weeks of the year. We stop doing podcasts, writing news, and doing all the stuff that is presumably why you guys even visit the website. We still had some stuff in the barrel, which is why things have been posted since The Fire of Christmas (there wasn’t actually fire but it sounds way more dramatic when I say there was).
And with that, we all went home. BovieWan, NinjaKitty, and myself, all went home to visit family over the Christmas period (December 23rd-26th). On Christmas Eve, I received a call from TigerDirect.ca. They told me that aside from two things, everything in my computer was running great. The first thing was that the processor I had bought had its pins bent, probably from when I wrenched it out of the locked socket. The second was the hard drive, specifically the OS. Every time they tried to boot it the “Starting Windows” animation would go then freeze and crash to blue screen.
Thankfully, this was a problem we could fix ourselves. All we needed to do was reinstall the OS, Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit. Easy enough. Bovie’s done it dozens of times and I looked it up online. What could possibly go wrong? We’ll get to that in a minute.
So we all get back home and I am completely bored out of my skull because I can’t do any work and half of my games aren’t there anymore. So I sit around in my room for four days before I call up TigerDirect.ca and ask what’s up with my baby. They say that they were just going to call me and tell me to come pick my shit up. So head down there, with a box half the size of me on a city bus, to pick her up. I get there and the guy explains to me again what’s the deal with my system and what new parts I need to buy, which are a processor and PSU. I find a power supply, an Ultra HS750W, and go to get my processor. Unfortunately, they are out of the FX-6350. But they have the FX-6300 for about $10 cheaper. Unfortunately, they were sold out of that one, too. So I went with the FX-8350. But, almost as if the universe was cutting me a break, the tech that was helping me installed both the CPU and PSU completely free. Thanks, TigerDirect.ca tech whose name I never learned. And then I came back home, computer in tow, and $330 poorer (thank you SO much, Mom).
Now, I just need to install the OS. According to the internet I can do that by downloading the ISO files for my OS, put them on to a disc or flash drive, and Bob’s your uncle. Here’s where things started to go wrong. The first thing to go wrong was we couldn’t find any blank discs to burn the ISO files on to. The second thing to go wrong was that the files weren’t in the right format for a flash drive. The third thing to wrong was we couldn’t find a flash drive. The fourth thing to go wrong was the flash drive we found wasn’t big enough. The fifth thing to go wrong was we couldn’t get the USB SD card reader to work with the program that converts the files to the right format. The sixth problem was the OS install thing said that the files were corrupted or something and couldn’t work. It was either because of the reader, which was kind of messed, or the files themselves, which we torrented. To top it all off, things were happening around the apartment that I won’t go in to, so everyone was kind of shit to be around last night.
And that brings us to today. I ordered a proper USB device, and that should be here by Friday. Then I can get the OS installed with proper files on a proper thing, get my computer back up and running, and hope that my computer didn’t lose every Photoshop file I use for the video thumbnails or the intro videos I use for gameplay videos. If things go well, I should be back up and running by Saturday, meaning we can get the stuff we still have in the barrel of my computer (assuming it’s still there) to you guys in a week or two.
This turned out a bit more wordy than I thought it would. Sorry about that. If you managed to stick it through to the end, I appreciate it, and am dreadfully sorry that all this stuff happened. I am doing everything I can to bring you reasons to visit this website every day, and am eternally grateful to anyone who does. And worst case scenario, another $100 and a few more weeks on to that waiting time, but we will be back. I can at least promise you that.
Thanks for an amazing 2013 everybody, hope you had a great Christmas, and I can’t wait to see what 2014 has in store for us here at Death’s Door Prods. Enjoy your New Year’s folks, and try not kill anyone with your car. Do it with a knife, instead. Trust me, it’s way better.
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