Back up regularly my friends as you never know when disaster will strike.

There's actually some good news and bad news so I'll break out the bad news first.

My old power board was super dodgy and probably quite unsafe so I decided to get out there and replace it. The rocker switch was broken so an accidental knock to the power board meant lights out for many key components in my room (see also: my computer).

I'm now the proud owner of a new concealed power board by ****** which has 6 slots and clips together in a clamshell sort of setup. This is super handy as I have a major problem with dust in my room so this should help to minimise that issue.

As I busily unplugged and replugged all the cables in to my new power board I took the time to also get the dust out of there and make sure everything wasn't tangled up etc. When I was satisfied with my handiwork I decided to flick the switch on my new PC and that's when everything went downhill.

Basically I didn't plug my monitor power cable in properly on the power board end and as I wiggled it around I realised my PC power cable also wasn't quite in the socket. The short story is that in the wiggling the PC turned on and off quite rapidly a few times and as a result the hard disk I had with windows on it and all my productivity applications turned in to my new paper weight.

Thankfully I backed up a few weeks ago so all I really lost was some email.

The good news is that I took the opportunity to order 2 new 750GB hard drives and slotted them in to my machine last night. I now have 1421GB / 2100GB free which means that i'm technically close to a terabyte of used storage, truly remarkable. :)

The moral of the story is to back up regularly and often and always always make sure you check everything is plugged in perfectly before turning anything on!

Since I'm a subscriber to GS I guess I should make use of all the features available to me so I'm going to start blogging. Whether it'll be a regular occurance, who knows, but I'll give it a go. I suspect no one will read it anyways :P

So last night I put together my new computer, its been a few weeks coming to be honest. I've had most of the parts here in my house for a few weeks except for one key ingredient - the Zalman Reserator XT.

I've been water cooling my rigs for the last few years and ever since I made the switch I've never been able to even contemplate air cooling. Sure you might spring a leak but as long as you do appropriate research and testing it's pretty unlikely.

So anyways I ordered my Reserator from a local online store and it arrived last week. I run through the first test which is to plug a short hose into the "in" and "out" channels and run water through the system for about 30-60 mins. Flip the switch to turn it on and that's where the problem started. No flow.

To make a long story short I was pretty pissed off because I expected to have my new machine ready for the release weeked of W:AR but that wasn't to be.

Alls well that ends well though because I returned it on Tuesday and the guys that sold it to me investigated the problem. Turns out the QA at Zalman is pretty flakey because the pump inside the unit wasn't plugged in!

So I put everything together yesterday and reinstalled all my bits and pieces and everything's all sweet now.

Here are the specs of my new rig:

Intel Core 2 Duo Quad Q9450 (2.66Ghz) LGA775
ASUS P5Q-PRO
2 x 2048MB Team Xtreem Dark DDR2 PC6400 800Mhz
768MB nVIDIA 8800GTX
2 x Samsung 400GB SATA HDD (There's a few other drives too but these are new)
Pioneer 215D SATA DVD-R/RW
Gigabyte ODIN 800W PSU
Coolermaster Cosmos S
Zalman Reserator XT w/ Zalman 8800GTX waterblock

I'm currently using only the water and the coolermaster's included 200mm case fan (big and very slow moving -> airflow with minimal noise) and my CPU is a pleasant 18C. Similarly my motherboard is 27C which is well below the threshold of 45C.

Although these temps are at idle the best part about the XT is that it can ramp up its fan speed to match the temperature so it only creeps up a degree or 5 which is outstanding.

I'm going to try tweaking it up a little now, a little light overclocking never hurt :)