In other news, I’m giving up installing Windows on the external drive. I’ve passed the point where the expense of time and effort has bypassed the expected benefit. I can’t help but be annoyed–doing this with linux takes no effort–but I guess I can’t be too disappointed. Microsoft software is designed to make profits for Microsoft, not to benefit the user. It’s useless to be disappointed each time this manifests itself.

Aviation Life Support Equipment is a small, but heavily-trafficked office just outside the briefing rooms at the stagefield. Before every flight, one of the pilots goes to ALSE to check out life-support vests to wear in-flight. The vests are packed with goodies which are only useful after having been shot down. We wear them, even in training flights in the US, because the Army thinks it good policy that every pilot be thoroughly convinced that one simply doesn’t fly without an ALSE vest.

They’re also the people in charge of maintaining helmets. As I was returning the vests from today’s flight, the ALSE guy noticed that my helmet had been issued to me last September, and offered to refurbish it.

About 40 minutes later, after the debriefing, I stopped by at ALSE and discovered that they had replaced and tightened all the moving parts, given me a new chinstrap to replace the old one, and replaced the microphone and speakers with newer versions. This kind of continuous upgrade service is astonishingly cool–if they serviced computers, the equivalent would be adding a gig of ram, upgrading the video card, and throwing another hard drive into the RAID. All of this, just because my helmet is six months old.

Sometimes, Army life is demanding. Events like this, though, make me feel like I have the coolest job in the world.

It took about a month before the replacement motherboard arrived. At that point, I discovered that I needed more parts (to strip the old thermal gunk from the processor, and to replace it when I reassembled the system), which took another two weeks to arrive. There was another week of procrastination, but today I finally had the system reassembled and booted it for the first time in quite a while.

My biggest worry since then has been my data: the sole partition on that machine was a virtual drive composed of a RAID 0, implemented in the motherboard. This constrained my options when I was looking for a new motherboard, because if the new MB couldn’t see the RAID, then I would be screwed.

To my vast relief, on boot, the RAID validates just fine and Windows starts to boot. Of course, Windows doesn’t actually _finish_ booting; that’d be too convenient. It gets partway, then reboots; safe mode doesn’t fix that problem. It looks like the next step will be to reinstall Windows so it can get used to the new hardware, making sure not to format the drive.

I’ve had the experience of installing a new Windows over an old without a format before, and discovered that it’s not an entirely sanitary process. I end up with a lot of old _WINDOWS directories and so forth that I’m not allowed to delete. I’d really like to just keep my own data, deleting everything that Windows will install, so that I can reinstall to a fairly clean state.

Ideas how to do that?

Solution: integrate the drivers into the install CD with nLite.

It’s a very cool program.

In the past, I’ve bought systems pre-assembled from various companies. Unfortunately, my budget was always, at best, limited, so my only option was to buy old technology and then run it as long as it held up.

My options are now expanded, due to two factors: I have a job, and I have the confidence to attempt assembling the thing myself. The question now comes down to a matter of components. This time, I want to buy parts that are at or near the top of the line, in the hopes that I’ll be able to use this machine for a Long Time.

That said, this will be only the second machine I’ve ever assembled from components, and I’d like to hear what people have to say about what I’ve chosen. If there are substantially better components out there, I’d like to know; I’m hoping that this machine starts out fairly near the cutting edge. I’m also interested to know what people have to say about design issues: I’m hoping to just plug everything together and have it work, but I have no way of knowing if (for example) I’d need additional fans/heatsinks/cooling systems.

Case:	Cooler Master CAC-T05 (Centurion C5) (black w/ blue trim)
CPU:	Athlon 64 FX-57 San Diego
MB:	MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum
RAM:	CORSAIR ValueSelect 2x512Mb 184-Pin DDR SDRAM Unbuffered DDR 400
PS:	Enermax Liberty EL500AWT 500W
HD:	SAMSUNG SpinPoint P Series 160GB SATA x2 (RAID 0 via motherboard)
OD:	NEC IDE/ATAPI DVD Burner Model ND-3550A – OEM (black)
VC:	MSI NX7800GT-VT2D256E Geforce 7800GT (I can later upgrade to two with SLI)

How does it look?