Moving Old PC, Building New PC

• Status

• Guild Wars 2
• Lord of the Rings Online

I drove back to the old house after work Wednesday to pick up some things to improve my camping experience in the new house, and while I was there I unplugged my PC and a monitor and threw it into the car. (Not literally. But close, because it’s still frickin' hot as hell, and after less than a half hour of moving around in the old house, sweat was pouring off of me in rivers and I felt like I could barely stand up from the weight of all the humidity pressing down on me. It’s possible I’m not in the greatest of shape.)

I wasn’t planning to bring over the PC, but circumstances forced my hand. I sat down in the sweltering computer room to log into Guild Wars 2 so I could get my Living Story Season 3 episode unlocked, and of course the launcher launched into a game update which looked like it would take hours. I watched the progress bar for a few seconds, sighed, said to hell with it, shut down the computer, and commenced ripping out cables. Now that I’ve moved my PC, there’s definitely no going back to the old house.

Of course, as I think I mentioned before, I don’t have any tables or desks or anything at the new house yet, so I had to setup the PC on the floor. It’s not ideal. It would be tolerable for playing controller games but naturally I forgot to bring over my controller. So I tried to play LotRO*, continuing my feeble efforts to try to see the whole game before they shut it down, but it was not fun. Too much contortion was required to access a mouse and keyboard. I turned in one quest, picked up a few others, killed one mob, and logged off.

But at least I got the GW2 Living Story thingy unlocked, which was the whole point of moving the PC in the first place. Maybe someday I will actually play it. I haven’t finished the Heart of Thorns story yet and while I know it’s not required to play the Living Story, it feels like it would be cheating to skip it.

The new gaming PC, by the way, sits partially assembled on a kitchen counter. I don’t have nearly as much patience for putting together PCs as I used to, so I only work on it in small chunks. The latest obstacle is that I can’t quite puzzle out from the rather obtuse MSI motherboard manual which SATA connectors I should be using for the SSD and spinny hard drive. There are 6 connectors and while it seems fairly intuitive to use 1 and 2, the manual seems to imply, with a series of unintelligable illustrations, that some connectors support some SATA features while others don’t. Trial and error would normally be my friend here, but because the SATA connectors are hard to get to (being on the edge of the motherboard, jammed up against the hard drive bays), I want to make sure I get it right on the first try. I’m probably overthinking it.

The new case for the new gaming PC is like nothing else I’ve seen before, by the way. I spent a little extra on a “gaming” case (which basically just means it’s slightly more interesting to look at than a plain rectangular box, and also it has like 17 fans built in). It’s the first case I’ve ever seen where the power supply is below the motherboard instead of above it. I think I like it.

* It seems like every time I try to play LotRO, I have to sit through a half hour of game updates, and by the time they are done, I have moved on to something else and don’t want to play anymore.