A glimps into my life

[Fedora Gal]

 Greetings my fellow crazy RW members,

You may have noticed I've been absent for quite a while, and I guess this post is just to let everyone know what's going on with me, and where I've gone.

For all those of you playing WOW, I apologize but I persued other avenues when the commotion started a while back, and switched over to EQII where I got myself into a Role Playing Guild. I did come back to WOW a few times but whenever I logged it it was usually just me and Feeble on-line so I'd chat a lil then go right back to EQII.  I am planning on coming back into WOW but due to other circumstances 'am forced to not be able to play much of anything right now.

Other Circumstances:

Well, I won't go into big detail about my numerous large financial hits to my pocket book lately, just tell you about the one most relevant to my absences
In short I fried the processor two weekends ago and sent my computer up to Doc Mel to have new parts put in ('cause if he breaks it it's his fault ). Sent the computer through our good pals Purolator who managed to put something pretty heavy on it, even though the box was labeled Fragile, and my brand new aluminum computer case collapsed inside the packaging pretty much wrecking all of my current computer components. It didn't help that the computer had a water cooling system installed, and the resevoir broke when the case collapsed spilling water/antifreeze like solution all over the inside of the case. Purolator is doing an inspection to see if they will pay out the insurance I had on the system, but the verdict isn't out on that yet. Either way I'm out a decent computer until the end of July.

Other financial bubbles are causing me to crunch down on my spending and I may have to close both my EQ2 and WOW accounts for a while, but I'm going to avoid that if I can. In the mean-time I appologize for me taking off on y'all in WOW it's nobodies fault really we all run on different schedules and it was a lil lonely being the guild of one, I can't help it if I have no life.....tehee.

[Mr. Analog]

 Wow that really sucks, maybe some of us can donate parts for Fraga?

I could donate a 30G drive and maybe a sound card?

[Fedora Gal]

 I'm still awaiting the diagnosis on the parts, but I was having Mel put in a new mobo, proc and ram....and the mobo has on-board sound and nic so that part's covered at least.

I'll keep you posted once I know what parts are for sure toast and maybe put in a mercy plee to borrow some components for frag and take you up on your offer Mr. A!

[Melbosa]

 I've always got parts around too.  I'm sure we'll have a computer for ya sis.

[Melbosa]

 Well you want to see the damage?  Here is a play by play of my experience with this situation:

Monday:

Receieve Package and everything seems ok.  I turn the box and notice that the box isn't quite right.  So I open the box and remove the computer.  Looks ok enough inside.

First I take a look at the front of the case.  This is where I begin to think life is not so good for my sister anymore.  I take a look at the top of the case and notice that the mounts are pushing through the roof of the tower.  That's when I opened the case:

WOW!!!

So basically I take a closer look down the run of the tower.  Yep definately something heavy on the case caused a buckle.

Here are some close ups of the damage:

Radator for Watercooling

Where the water came from, cracked tank

Pump and Video Card Collide

So as of right now I am still trying to get Purolator out to take a look at this thing.  So I don't know what works and what doesn't.

[Lazybones]

 Looking at t eh outer case and inner damage it looks more like it was dropped from a significant hight. If it had something on top of it the out case would be distorted and those plastic feet would have probably broken.

Sucks big time.

[Mr. Analog]

 HO-LEE @%&#! I will never ever ship via Purolator again, they just made the list...

[Fedora Gal]

 Holy Crap,

I don't think that vid's going to be any good. Something would have had to have jostled it real hard for that pump to come loose, those suction cups work like an SOB.

Definately got hit hard to knock the floppy drive loose, it's hooked in with a spring lock mechanism which is hard to get the drive out to begin with. Lazy should know it's the same case he bought.

that's insane, I'm even more upset now that I've seen the damage, and only a week left until Frag! and Purolator is still playing the run-around game, haven't even hooked up with Mel to look at it yet, wouldn't come when he was available and then stopped by the next day when he had told them he wouldn't be there.

Just as an afterthought which way was it in the case? Front down or Front up? I can't remember.

*edited* NM looked closer at the empty box photo it was Front up.

[Lazybones]

Definately got hit hard to knock the floppy drive loose, it's hooked in with a spring lock mechanism which is hard to get the drive out to begin with. Lazy should know it's the same case he bought.

Didn't install a floppy drive in mine, really have no use for them any more. Well other than installing RAID drivers during windows installs but I don't have my system in a RAID.

The full water block and loose pump where probably big factors in the damage. The still would have had to put some heavy G force on it but the heavy water tank probably bent the cage and the pumps suction cups probably didn't last through temperature changes while shipping.

[Ustauk]

 Well, I asked my brother, who's back in Ottawa now, and he said it'd be ok to lend Shae his old machine (he left his tower behind and is using a laptop in Ottawa) for Frag if hers can't be fixed in time.  Its pretty old, however, so I'm not sure how much it can run.  It has a Geforce4 TI4200 vid card (won't run BF2), a 1.333 Athlon Thunderbird, 512 meg of SDRAM (had DDR slots on board) , an 80 gig hard drive, and the choice of onboard ECS K7S5A sound or a Soundblaster Ensoniq.

[Tonnica]

 Man, that's just some XTRA nasty damage. It defenitely looks like more than just a heavy weight was placed on top of the case to cause the damage. It looks like it was bashed right against the corner of something at the centre of the box with considerable force. I know the Tsunami Dream is a lighter case because of the aluminium build, but it's no slouch for sturdiness despite its weight class (I have the same case myself now so I can tell)! If anything can be salvaged from that mess I'll be amazed.

And I know you shouldn't shoot the messenger bearing bad tidings, but man! A good solid kick to the nads wouldn't be too unacceptable I think...

If you need a computer case I'm sure Mr. A wouldn't mind lending out Frakenserver's box. Now that I've got my stuff transferred out of the frankenserver box it's just sitting there waiting for someone to wuv it. I can also lend ya a DVD ROM drive if you need it.

[Mr. Analog]

 No, Frankenserver rests silent in the Apartment of Doom waiting for whomever is foolish enough to install a PII power supply in it and once more unleash the 30 lbs of obsolete computing terror upon the world.

The case you have is my old file server, an AOPEN server tower that's roomy, easy to work with and devilishly mundane...

[Shayne]

HO-LEE @%&#! I will never ever ship via Purolator again, they just made the list...

After FedEx managed to get my motherboard, chip and RAM from Austin, Texas to my front door in about 9 hours (shipped at 7:00am, had it in my hands at 4:30pm), i will never use anybody else.  Sure, it probably hit the flights and trucks at the right time, but still impressive

[Tonnica]

devilishly mundane...

I won't deny it. It is to the creative and chaotic as this room is to a modern goth chick. It's a bit heavy too, but darn it if it's not got that olde-tymey General Electric-esque sturdiness where if you drop it from three stories up it works better. When a computer is running in the frankenserver case it doesn't so much push and pop the stack as it bludgeons and uppercuts it.

Well now that I'm completely offtopic: PC COMBAT! Dun dun dun dun da dun da dun dun dah! CASE-ALITY!

[Fedora Gal]

 Well e'res an update,

Still no word from purolator but they did finaly manage to get the damage inspection done so Mel could pull apart the pieces of my computer and finally determine how useless each part was.

The front of my water resevoir which was clear plexiglass and glued with special sealant stuff from the manufacturer popped right off the resevoir causing the water damage as there was no longer anything to hold the water in, and Mel found the missing face plates from my CD ROM somewhere inside the case with a ton of loose screws and other nice things floating around.

As for the parts, well I still have no response from Purolator and my computer is kind of a necessity so I ended up buying the new parts for Mel to put together for me figuring even if Purolator doesn't pay I'd have to foot out the cash anyway.

Here's what I got:

Already purchased b4 purolator incident:
Asus A7V8X-E Deluxe mobo (stuck with the socket A cause of my waterblock)
Sempron 3000+ w/512MB cache (don't make the Barton's anymore)
2x 512MB Kingston PC3200

New Stuff:
Same Case (memoryExpress didn't have any others I liked with 120mm fans)
OCZ 520W Modstream power supply
Maxtor DiamondMax 300GB SATA drive
Pioneer 16X DVD RW
ATI Radeon All in Wonder X800 XT AGP

Now I've got a question for those of you with experience with water cooling. Can you use a section of tubing as a resevoir instead of a seperate tank? I'm thinking that in a closed circuit there is very little evaporation happening so running an 'overflow' section of tubing and using that as your resevoir might work just as well, the only thing you'd have to watch would be to insure that your water levels are high at all times. Also, from experience what's the best way to drain and refil the system, with minimal risk of getting water all over your components?