It’s Over Nine Thousa---oh. Hundred. Nine hundred.

So, the latest school term has begun and my week has been busy busy busy for several reasons.

Firstly there is all the kerfuffle surrounding new timetables and the like. (Also, am impressed that Word’s spell checker recognises ‘kerfuffle’ as a real word...) This week I managed to do the work of about three people through no real fault of anyone in the department’s: that’s just what has had to be done in order to get ourselves off the ground. Now we finally seem to have a fourth member of staff in the department, things will hopefully get a bit easier. Tuesday was especially horrendous given the second item on this list and the fact that I did a full day’s teaching. 5x 1hr lessons with all new classes and one bad lot amongst them could certainly have been worse, but yeah...

The second thing kinda informs number 1 and subsequent items. Several weeks ago I had a flu-like thing that left me really badly roughed up. Horrendous cough coupled with sore throat, runny nose, headaches, and constant tiredness thanks to lack of sleep due to coughing, which took a good two weeks to clear. Unfortunately I passed it on to Dad and, this last week, he managed to pass it back to me. After a seven week holiday in which I did zero shouting of any kind, being back at work has taxed my immune system somewhat and by 4pm on Tuesday I could do little more than croak. I spent Wednesday and today feeling clogged up and coughing and sneezing on a regular basis, making me feel horridly filthy and unwell, but at least it has eased off somewhat by the constant imbibing of water. My throat is still swollen, but I can at least talk now, and I just hope this holds up for tomorrow.

The third thing was the most financially ruinous. While I get paid tomorrow for the two days I did last week, a grand total of probably slightly under £200 after tax/admin fees, I have managed to spend £926 in the last 7 days. This is a lot, even for me, but in many ways it needed to be paid. Several bits on my PC were making noises that I’m certain they shouldn’t have been making, and the machine was starting to stutter and crash more. Having had a good listen in to the case I gathered it was the CPU itself that was starting to go, and if I was gonna have to replace the processor, chances are I’d have to replace the motherboard as well. Rather than wait for the thing to melt, potentially destroying data in the process, I decided to go the preventative route.

Browsing scan.co.uk I managed to snag myself a couple of deals on components, beefing my system up from an AMD 64 X2 5600 processor and 4gig RAM on a 3-year old MSI motherboard with a GeForce 8800GTX to the following:—

Intel i7 quad-core Nephalem processor at 2.6ghz
Gigabyte EX58-Extreme Motherboard
XFX GTX285 graphics card (with free copy of Assassin’s Creed and Batman: Arkham Asylum)
6GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3 RAM

The new bits arrived yesterday at around 8am, waking me up from a fitful sleep. In fact, I’d probably only managed a couple of uncomfortable hours, but the thought of tinkering with technology spurred me on.

By 10:30am I’d got the case stripped out, the new motherboard, processor, heatsinks, graphics card et al installed, and I came to connect the final PSU-to-Motherboard connector and discovered that instead of a 4-pin connector, the motherboard needed an 8-pin.

Well shit.

Phoned up our local techstore and enquired about this new-fangled 8-pin whatsit. Apparently the higher end motherboards from the last 8-12 months have them instead of the old 4-pins.

“Do I just need an adaptor?” I foolishly ask.

“No Sir!” they reply. “It actually takes twice the juice as before.”

“So I need a new power supply?”

“Yeah. But we don’t carry the higher end ones in stock.”

Sigh. So in the end I had to phone round all the local stores to get one, and even then the earliest they could get it to me was today. Fortunately it was delivered early today so everything was, thankfully, up and running by about 1pm.

So add 1x Coolermaster M700 700watt modulated PSU to the above list.

In the end I’m very happy with the machine, which is running faster than ever; I’m just a bit miffed that I ended up paying so much for it because I didn’t wanna wait 3-5 working days — no computer over the weekend would have made for a very sad Jon, especially as I doubt going out on the town like this would be a very smart idea. Don’t want to give anyone what I’ve got (apart from the kids at school, but most of them deserve the pain! ¬_¬)

While I may be out of pocket for the next few weeks, I’m happy with my financial security; I’m also happy with my re-mastered PC, as well as for some of my friends who have had positive changes to their relationship statuses over the last couple of days.

Me next, I beg of thee! :-/

~Jon