a computer crisis

let me start by clarifying the title. this is not your normal computer crisis. so for those of you looking for a way to get windows/word/outlook/excel/etc. do something it should be able to do, look somewhere else. this is a crisis of a hardware nature.

i'm currently in the process of building a "sweet new machine" using components ordered from the greatest computer store on the planet, newegg.

in order to talk about this build, you need to understand the history of the build. so i'll start at the beginning. a year ago i began to assemble my resources to build my third computer from components ordered online. i decided it was time to move away from intel processors and give AMD 64's a try. i teamed up the AMD 64 with an ASUS motherboard, corsair ram and my old nvidia video card. since i'm writing a post about finishing my build a year later it's safe to assume things did not go well. it turns out the bios on the asus board did not support my AMD 64 chip and when i tried to flash the bios to fix this problem i rendered the motherboard useless. extremely pissed, i sent the motherboard, cpu and ram back to newegg and took some time to lick my wounds. i was out about $50 in restocking fees and my confidence in my computer building ability was shot. because i had some parts that would work with my old computer i decided that i would try again but this would not occur until the next summer, that would be right now.

so as i ready to attempt to build another AMD64 I'm going to document my thoughts and progress on this blog. maybe it can help someone build there own "sweet new machine." this is going to be a multi-parter and this is the end of part 1.