Major System FAIL!

Today, I am not impressed. The reason for my sour mood is two fold – firstly I have had an awful week in work and I already know that next week is going to be a nightmare due to staff holidays and me being the only one who can cover them. Secondly, I knew that my Windows 7 pre-order (thank you for the bargain eBuyer) would be dispatched on Thursday for delivery when ever the Royal Mail stop striking and get some work done, so I ordered some upgraded memory to help things run a little smoother. I very happily opened my shiny new Corsair XMS2 memory yesterday and was excited to get home, rip open the case and fit it. Upon starting up my PC I went in to the BIOS to see what voltage it was assigned – this was too low, so I upped it to the amount needed and rebooted. The next trip in to the BIOS showed that my FSB had done up to 1066Mhz thanks to the bottle neck of my old memory now being removed, as a result all the voltages required had increased slightly, but more importantly the speed of my system would finally reach its potential. I rebooted the system and allowed it to run in to Windows whilst eagerly monitoring the boot sequence to see how much quicker it was – just as the smug look of success came across my face I was greeted by that thing all PC enthusiasts dread … the Blue Screen of Death!!!

After some tinkering I decided to phone my cousin, who is a bit of a guru on these things and we ran some tests. These hinted that the problem may be with my PSU, which granted isn’t the most powerful, but it is a very good spec and from a top manufacturer. I had gambled on this PSU being enough for my machine when I last upgraded, but it seems I may have lost this one due to the faster FSB, two additional hard-drives and a fat graphics card. Reluctantly I decided to buy a new PSU, because even if it turns out not to be the PSU, I should really get one more suitable anyway. As usual I went on to the eBuyer site, but the choice wasn’t fantastic and many seemed over priced for some reason, so I looked elsewhere. It appears that eBuyer was, as usual, very competitively priced and much to my amazement PSU prices have doubled since I last bought one 3 years ago – WTF is that all about?!

The only explanation I can think of is that all the companies have jumped on the ‘Energy Saving’ bandwagon and decided that all of sudden the same heap of junk, with a bigger fan (to reduce noise) and some plugs (to allow excess cables to be removed) is now worth a fortune – I was not impressed. In the end I settled on a 600W OCZ ModXStream that ticked all the boxes, but didn’t break the bank – thanks to OCUK.

I’m hoping that it will arrive tomorrow so I can get my system stable and backup everything before I install Windows 7 and start on the next bunch of issues.

ARGHHHHH!