Today was a day full of discoveries starting in the early morning. The UPS guy delivered me my GeForce 8800 GTX back. EVGA couldn’t do anything. Actually that’s not true, they didn’t have to do anything because it was working fine after a hundred hours of testing. But let me describe a little about my silence the last week first.

Of course I had a very stressful week thanks to the exam season. And on Tuesday I accidentally deleted my video archive on Titanium, my biggest hard disk. Totally. I only wanted to delete the DivX Videos folder that pops up every fucking time I reboot, it’s my personal fight against the windmills. But this time I had selected the whole video folder: 200 gigs of a good 2500 meticulously ordered videos — of course Vista would dump the files because they were too large for the Recycle Bin¹, but I just hit Enter without really noticing because I thought it was the DivX folder. 100% my fault.

To cut a long story short: I learned Avira UnErase works with 32 bit systems only. So I had to power up my notebook and began to evacuate my deleted files from Titanium. I set up a LAN to my desktop PC so I could copy the large files from the tiny notebook hard disk. Needless to say that restoring the files ain’t a high speed task. It was like copying 200 gigs file by file via USB 1.0.

Shortly before my first lecture today I jammed my freshly received GeForce back into the motherboard, this time not as slave but as master in the SLI. On the way I solved more or less the problem with my not functioning external box of my SoundBlaster X-Fi Platinum. Obviously it is a power problem: I have a 700 W power supply but obviously even that’s not enough:
It has to power 6 SATA disks, one DVD burner, one Striker Extreme Motherboard, 3 HDD-cooling Fans, one sound card, one additional HDD-fan used to cool the graphic cards and, of course, two GeForce 8800 GTX power gobbling graphic monsters. One day about two weeks ago the fans stopped working — just great. And now, when working on the guts of my PC I found out, that the power on the sound card came from one of those not working fan cables.

I used a cable that came directly from the power supply and now it works again! Yay! But it wasn’t easy finding an unused power outlet. Luckily I don’t have a floppy drive and it plugs into my soundcard. But before running off to my lecture I am just sitting in and writing these line while listening to Cool Jazz the PC wouldn’t start anymore. It’s one of those days I guess. I just hope I can blog these lines sooner or later. If you can read this IT WORKED! EDIT: …with one GeForce only. Grrr!
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1. Who came up with that in Windows 95 anyway? Why not call it “Save Storage” or “Recovery Folder” or something like that? It’s an other example of making a step back: Instead of completely coining computational concepts GUI designers still try to cram the outside world into the computer context. It’s like reading out text plates from silent movies instead of using film language. But that’s a whole other story. I recommend reading Lev Manovich on that topic. [back]