Battleangel

Finally got my replacement mainboard, an Epox 8KMM5i, for the mATX Media PC. About time. Hopefully everything should be set now and all my digital media woes will be over.

Let me just say that so far I’m extremely impressed with the Antec Aria case. Sure, it was expensive for its size, but the build quality is just excellent. I wish I could have a Server Tower case in the same design and finish. Wow. Really neat stuff. The parts are light-weight and fit like a glove. And even if the idea to place the 120mm fan INSIDE the PSU isn’t perfect it is, again, superior to anything else out there. All in all a compromise between open and proprietary design.

Having said that there were still a couple of snags … aren’t there always …

• Small Form Factor Fans … I hadn’t anticipated this but it soon became apparent that the Whisperrock fan that I intended to install wouldn’t fit. I removed the fan guard and the screws on one side to no avail. Even considered cutting some of the actual fan away with my Dremel but I stopped short of that. Had to use the stock fan that comes with the boxed Sempron processors. Argh!! A 60mm HSF fan and a sink with no copper core. Perhaps I can mount something that will allow me to use an 80mm fan with the same heatsink in the future.
• Partly because of the fan issue, the CPU temp got a little higher than I am comfortable with. I’ll look into this also.
• I was unable to install Windows XP. Something causes the install process to hang while probing for hardware. I get a blue screen that says nothing specific other than that something is not working. Having an old G400, a plain Maxtor HD and a Hitachi DVD, I assume it is something with the Mainboard. This Epox board is based on the Via KM400A chip and has several Via controller chips on board as well as an integrated UniChrome GPU.
  I was however not able to solve this so in the end I had to install Windows Me (gasp!!). Could have tried Win2k but I figured it was much too similar to XP. WinME worked like a charm though. Even if that doesn’t mean a lot since it is after all WinME. I was in a hurry to start up my torrents again so I felt that any OS was better than no OS at all. I figured
• This brings us to the final and biggest snag. Somehow, maybe when running partition magic to make room for an OS partition, maybe when starting Azureus, maybe when repeatedly restarting and hammering the XP install program, maybe when installing WinME and its blasted legacy DOS components, I had a major storage corruption. Bottom line, I lost Vampire Bloodlines (2000MB), VA-Ultimate-Disney (300MB), Seinfeld S1,2 (3000MB), Hotet (700MB), Half-Life 2 (1400MB), Barbarella (1400MB), Anacondas 2 (700MB) as well as part of Star Trek Next Generation Season 1,2 (about 5000MB). All in all about 15GB wasted. Even at full speed, it will take me many days to repair the damage. FUCK FUCK FUCK!