Ok -- It appears that my blogging habits are a bit 'binge and purge' like at the moment. Multiple posts per day for a whole week, then nothing but crickets for a week after that. I have a good excuse, however, as I was taking a few days of much needed vacation time. I try not to touch a computer that isn't running a game during my vacations, unless I find some good reason to work on one of my Open Source projects. But I do make a concerted effort to stay away from work activities (including blogging :)).

After a couple of days of upgrade pre-planning, including making some much needed backups, etc., I installed my new MSI Neo2 Platinum motherboard. I struggled a bit with the new bolt-through heatsink designs used on newer motherboards. The MSI board comes with a support plate on the rear of the motherboard and a clip harness on the front for mounting of the standard CPU heatsink which comes with the Athlon 64 retail package. Of course, I bought the OEM version and a different heatsink which requires a different backing plate, and a different front-side assembly. The stock backplate was glued onto the back of the motherboard, and the process of prying it off with a screwdriver was a very high anxiety activity. I even ended up in the OpenForum on Ars asking whether this was normal, and how I should go about getting the plate off without destroying my board. Before I got a decent answer from the forum, I had managed to free the plate from the board -- no damage done. nice.

The heatsink installation went well after that, but I had exhausted most of an evening getting the heatsink installed properly. The next day, I stripped the old components out of my case and did a full brain transplant. Aside from the initial heart attack I had when I touched the power supply button and heard a spark, and got no power to the board, things went well. I had not connected the second 5V power connector to my video card (really, it's easy to forget to apply extra power to an expansion card, sheesh.), and I guess the card was trying to draw too much power or something, which was keeping the system from powering on. After connecting the extra card power, everything came up fine. I ended up with some additional headaches trying to get WinXP to boot after installation, owing to the messed up partition table on my boot drive, courtesy of Fedora Core 2 (I won't go into the details... therapy has just about erased this part of my memory). A bit of BIOS tweaking, and I was up and running. Everything is better now -- colors are brighter, digital birds sing louder, and that annoying growth on my .... oh wait... work blog. AND, I get sustained ~40fps in the Counter Strike: Source video stress test on highest quality settings. And this is untweaked -- I've been able to overclock my 2.2GHz chip to just over 2.3GHz without crashing, so I might be able to squeeze a bit more performance out using the Dynamic Overclocking Technology (DOT) that is provided by the MSI Neo2 platform.

Speaking of games, I really like the new Valve Steam service. It's kinda like what other companies have been promising regarding software as a service. You download the Steam client, and can browse the catalog of games (both Valve and 3rd party) available on the service. I bought the Half-Life 2: Silver pack, which allows me to download most of Valve's game catalog for play. I don't have to worry about game updates, content packs, or external server lists (e.g. gamespy), as Steam provides all of these features. When I re-install my system, I just have to enter into my account and it will download the bits I own to my system again. No trying to find the jewel case with the right serial number anymore. Cool idea.