Friday night I was chatting with my spiders co-mod Ocean10000 and right in the middle of chat all my screens went black, poof, gone.
A quick exam of the computer revealed the over-clocked gaming graphics card was hot enough to bake bread, smouldering hot, so on a hunch and a couple of 3rd degree finger burns, assumed the graphics card had fried, baked or roasted. Threw another $200 down the toilet replacing old gaming graphics card with another at Best Buy and VOILA! it worked the first time, much to my amazement that something was finally simple to resolve after all the crap going wrong this month but that's another thread, or 3, or 20...
Anyway, what's up with virgin motherboards that have never been touched since being shipped from the factory? Seems you almost need a degree in dentistry to remove cables and extract cards the first time as they simply don't want to budge. I honestly expected a fractured motherboard to result from the amount of effort required to remove this graphics card.
Then, naive me, I thought while I'm at it, let's toss in an extra 4GB of RAM in those 2 empty slots, easy 'nuff? Easy hell, those slots didn't want to let the card in quite all the way nor did the locking clips on either end work properly. Had to exert Herculean strength to get those memory cards securely inserted. Another chance to fracture the motherboard just taunting us to push harder, break something, dare you.
Finally got the cards seated and locked into place, worked first time, whew.
With all the extra memory and much faster graphics it's like getting a new machine!
But was it worth the fuss?
