It has been exciting around here, some of the excitement I would happily do without. But one source of excitement and joy was a birthday present to Alexander on his 21st  birthday. He is working on his degree in Computer Science Gaming and Dan (his Dad) and I thought that a powerful computer capable of at least keeping up in the gaming world would be an appropriate gift. The parts of this custom designed and locally assembled computer arrived over  several days. Finally on Sunday, Alexander was around and Dan had some free time and I brought back memories from too many years ago delving into the guts of large tower computer chassis. 

We started putting pieces in the chassis at around 10 AM. Somehow we forgot one important ingredient. We had the manuals with checkoff lifts in sequence for the parts on hand, but no one thought to read ahead. The water cooling system for the powerful CPU includes a radiator and two fans. We very carefully installed it on the wrong wall of the chassis. The motherboard wouldn’t fit. While Dan was busy setting up a Return and ordering a replacement, I started reading. There was an alternate location for the radiator which we had not noted. This required getting at the back of the motherboard, again. This time one of us noticed a “door’ on the bottom of the chassis which we could open to get at the area under the CPU. Another big cheer as we had just saved 30  minutes uninstalling reinstalling the motherboard.

Once we had the radiator, motherboard, power supply and video card installed it was just a matter of running what seemed like an endless number of wires to ittybitty pins all over the place. By 5 or 6 we were ready to turn on the power – NOTHING – oops there are 3 power switches and each one needed to be tweaked. It came up with pretty lights and fans starting and stopping as needed. I left for dinner and 90 minutes later returned to find that Windows had installed and the machine was ready to be setup for use.

On another front Carol has pictures of legs extending out from under the front of the coach while I worked on latches to keep the generator slide closed. I had only tinkered with this slide as a place to locate a wifi router at the end of a long cable from the house . I was removing it after Corey and I had run 120 feet of wire from the far side of the house to the coach with a DSL (internet) signal so we could have our own internet connection in the coach. Dan and I completed the wiring and it worked, and continues to work, on the first try!

One more project involves the new water heater which stopped working and displayed a code meaning “feed me new parts.” The new part will be here tonight, but in the mean time the water heater decided to resume working after being off for 48 hours. ???? Carol doesn’t trust it and continued to shower in the house. 

While we are at it. The front heat pump also returned from the defunct and has been providing both heat and cooling as required. I have done nothing to make that happen other than try it from time to time. I have a mobile tech coming, someday when the rain stops to diagnose what can be diagnosed and repair what he can. I have had enough crawling under the coach and I won’t go on the roof to work. I am too wise to do what I can hire done and choose to transfer the money from my pockets to eliminate the physical risk to this older body.

For pictures of me under the coach click here