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Building My New PC

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When I first started buying computers, they got so much better every year that a seven year old computer like mine would have been completely unable to run software designed for the newest computers. The pace of advancement is slower these days, however, so even though it’s several generations out of date, my computer was still pretty usable from a performance perspective with most applications.

A couple of months ago, however, it started crashing. It would be okay for a few days but then it would start crashing over and over 5 or 6 times within a few hours, reporting a variety of reasons. Just in case it was a software problem, I tried repaving it — wiping out the hard drive and reinstalling Windows and everything else from scratch — but the crashing continued. If I knew more about computer hardware (and had supplies handy) I might have tried replacing parts until the crashing stopped, but that seemed like a lot of work for a computer that was kind of clunky and old fashioned. I decided I wanted a nice shiny new one.

As usual, I wanted something with a lot of performance. I’m not talking about a bleeding-edge gaming system — getting that last little bit of extra performance is way too costly — but I definitely wanted to find something speedier than a typical office computer. I started by visiting all my favorite custom gaming computer vendors — Origin, Maingear, CyberPower, Falcon, Digital Storm — and using their configuration systems to put together a whole bunch of different fantasy computers, trying out combinations of parts to see how the cost worked out for various options.

My search ended where it always does: With me realizing I could get exactly what I wanted and save hundreds of dollars by purchasing the parts separately and building the computer myself.  I’m not an expert at building PCs, but it’s not that hard these days. Tom’s Hardware has excellent instructions, a buying guide, and tons of component reviews. If you can wire up an entertainment system in your living room, you can build your own PC.

I can’t say that putting together a PC is a fool-proof operation, but it’s definitely fool tolerant: You might not be able to get it working, but short of major physical mishandling, it’s pretty hard to damage the parts. So you can just keep trying again and again until you get it right. And if that doesn’t work, just take all the parts to a storefront PC repair store with good reviews (not one of the big box computer stores) and tell them “I fucked up my build. Can you put it together for me?” It will cost you something, but it will still be cheaper than buying a high-end system pre-assembled.

I did decide to do one thing different this time: I wanted an overclocked PC. I had avoided overclocking in the past because it sounded like too much trouble. A CPU chip running faster than the manufacturer’s specified speed can be unstable, and wasn’t I trying to replace a computer that kept crashing?

The thing is, overclocking has become pretty mainstream. Both Intel and AMD sell CPU chips that have the clock controls unlocked, and several motherboard manufacturers sell boards that have the extra power management and specialized software you’ll need. The overclocking process is a bit complicated, and feeding a CPU too much power can destroy it, but as long as you’re reasonably careful, the worst thing that happens is that the CPU heats up more than usual. You can fix that by adding more cooling.

Oh, you can still do crazy, bleeding edge speed tricks. The latest one I heard of is “delidding,” which means carefully slicing the top off the CPU module to expose the circuitry inside and replacing the internal packing with material that conducts heat better. But for more mainstream overclocking, all you need is an unlocked CPU, a motherboard with overclocking support, and good cooler.

I finally decided to buy

  • Intel’s top-of-the line 8th generation Core i7 processor. It only has 6 cores, but the processors with more cores are slower and I’ve generally found that peak core speed is more important for my applications than more cores. I rarely even peg all 4 cores in my current computer.
  • I nice overclocking motherboard from MSI.
  • 32 GB of DDR4 memory. Some of my applications are really memory hogs. I got 3200MHz RAM because people doing benchmarks were reporting that faster RAM didn’t make much of a difference for normal kinds of loads.
  • A Samsung EVO M.2 solid state drive, because those memory hogging programs need to fill that memory as fast as possible.
  • A 280mm liquid cooling system. It’s a completely sealed system, so there’s nothing to fill or replace. Basically, it works like a car radiator in miniature: There’s a pump attached to the CPU and it pumps coolant to a radiator mounted at the top of the case. Calling it 280mm just means that the radiator is attached to a pair of 140mm fans.
  • A GeForce 1080 graphics card. My monitors are IPS displays for accurate color rendering for photography at HD resolutions, so I don’t need the much-more-expensive 1080Ti, which is for driving high-frame rate 4K gaming monitors. I could probably get away with a 1070, but the 1080 is only slightly more expensive.
  • A 750 watt power supply. That’s more than it will ever use, but you don’t want to be straining your power supply.
  • A Master Cooler MasterCase MC500P. At $127, it’s the most I’ve ever paid for a computer case, and it was definitely worth it. It has good cable routing and airflow, it comes with all the screws and hardware you’re likely to need, and it’s very flexible about how you mount components. It’s also just well made. All the removable parts reattach without having to fiddle with them. Plus it has handles on top to make it easy and safe to carry. It truly made the build much easier.

Once all the parts arrived, I started assembly. There were a lot of parts to connect:

  • Clamp the CPU on the motherboard.
  • Install the hard drive.
  • Mount the motherboard in the case.
  • Mount the power supply in the case.
  • Install the memory.
  • Run the motherboard power cable.
  • Run the CPU power cable.
  • Attach the front panel hard drive indicator light.
  • Attach the power switch and power indicator light.
  • Attach the reset switch.
  • Attach the front panel USB.
  • Attach the lower front fan.
  • Attach the upper front fan (had to remove and rotate it to make it reach).
  • Attach the built-in speaker.
  • Install the radiator and fans.

At this point I decided to attach the pump to the CPU. This was the trickiest part because the base of the pump has a heat sink with fluid channels, and it is covered with a special heat-conducting paste that will be pressed between it and the CPU to create a good heat-conducting connection. If I got this wrong and I had to remove the pump from the CPU, it would mess up the paste and it couldn’t be used again. I only had one chance to get this right, or else I’d have to buy paste remover and more paste and clean everything off to try again.

Fortunately, everything went fine. I kept going.

  • Run the pump power cable (via SATA-style cable).
  • Attach the pump monitor cable.
  • Attach the top front radiator fan cable.
  • Attach the top rear radiator fan cable.
  • Run the fan USB control cable.
  • Remove the 3.5″ hard drive bay to improve airflow.
  • Install the video card.

That was it. Everything was installed. I attached a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and then it was time to plug it in and turn it on. I it to show me the BIOS setup screen, but instead the screen remained blank. Uh-oh.

I had heard the fans spin up, and I could see lights on the motherboard, so obviously something was happening. In fact, the fans slowed down after a few seconds, which meant they were under motherboard control. So why wasn’t I getting video?

It turned out I had forgotten to run power cables to the video card. High-end gaming cards draw far too much power to run off the motherboard power bus, but I had forgotten to hook these up. So:

  • Run video card power cables.

After that, it booted up just fine and showed my the BIOS config screen. I plugged in the thumb drive I had built and

  • Upgraded the onboard BIOS software to the latest version.
  • Installed Window 10 Pro.

Then I rebooted to Windows and installed all the rest of the software:

  • Intel chipset drivers.
  • RealTec audio drivers.
  • Intel bluetooth driver.
  • Intel network driver.
  • Intel WiFi driver.
  • MSI App manager.
  • MSI Super charger (enables charging stuff on USB cables).
  • Samsung Magician SSD management software.
  • Corsair cooler control software.
  • NVidia GeForce 1080 drivers and utilities.
  • Windows updates.
  • AIDA64 Extreme monitoring software.

With all the drivers installed and the operating system up to date, it was time to try some overclocking. First I wanted to see how the base CPU looked. So I fired up AIDA64 and ran the stress test. The CPU cores immediately heated up and the case fans all sped way up. And I noticed something odd: There was no air blowing out of the top of the case from the radiator. I held a piece of paper over it, and it got sucked down onto the fan grill.

Dammit. I had installed the fans upside down. The two front fans pull air in, and with the two top fans also pulling air in, the single rear exhaust port was probably not going to keep up. So I had to disconnect all the external cables, open up the case, remove the radiator, remove the fans and flip them, reattach the radiator, close things up, and try again. This time I got the air flowing the right way.

Now it was time to install the all software that makes my computer useful:

  • Chocolatey install scripting software.
  • Chrome browser.
  • Firefox browser.
  • Logitech unifying software.
  • Microsoft Office 365.
  • Epson workforce 845 printer drivers.
  • Notepad++ text editor.
  • 7zip file compression utility.
  • Adobe Reader.
  • Keyfinder.
  • FileZilla FTP client.
  • Greenshot screen capture software.
  • Plantronics headset hub software.
  • Slack messaging.
  • BeyondCompare file comparison tool.
  • Treesize.
  • Microsoft Visual Studion 2017.
  • Resharper.
  • DataGrip.
  • PuTTY.
  • Java runtime.
  • git source code control.
  • Sourcetree GUI for git.
  • R Studio.
  • Python.
  • PyCharm.
  • Kindle reader.
  • Logitech gaming tools.
  • Steam.
  • Google Earth.
  • Ispy
  • VLC
  • Paperscan
  • Brother P-Touch editor
  • Photoshop
  • Lightroom

That sounds like a lot to install, but I use a set of Choclatey config files to install about 2/3 of them automatically in one shot. It went pretty quickly.

So now I’m sitting here working on my brand new computer. It’s a little underwhelming. After all that work, it just doesn’t feel like a shiny new system. Probably because I’m doing all the same things with it as I did with my old computer. But with the clock running at 5 GHz, it does all the things faster.

Headway Themes, WTF?

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It all began to go wrong when I started writing a post for Maggie’s Friday the 13th call for support, about how the sex work community on Twitter was responding to the one-two punch of FOSTA/SESTA and the Backpage raid. The post needed a lot embedded tweets from sex workers, and while I was reviewing the post I noticed something odd: My blog was not displaying the tweets correctly.

Normally, an embedded tweet pretty closely resembles the appearance of a tweet in Twitter. For example, tweeting the title of this post should look something like this:

But when I previewed the post, the embedded tweets looked more like this:

That layout, with the author’s name coming after the content, looks like the way the HTML is sent to the browser before it is styled. The tweet styling must be applied afterward, probably by some JavaScript, and for some reason, the script isn’t styling the tweet correctly. Weirdly, however, if you look at the same post on the main blog page, the tweets look like they’re supposed to. They also look like they’re supposed to if I switch the blog to one of the standard themes that comes with WordPress. All of this points to a problem with the theme I’m using.

It’s not that simple though, because I’m using the Headway theme framework. That’s a very cool tool which allows me to visually design custom themes. However, when I fired up the Headway Visual Editor, I saw that I was using a shared set of styling rules for the main page and the individual post pages, so they should be rendered the same. But clearly they’re not. This was beginning to smell like some kind of bug in how Headway renders single post pages.

Before going further down that road, I wanted to make sure I was running the most up-to-date version of the framework. It’s supposed to be updated automatically, but of the update failed, an old version of the theme framework might not work quite right on newer versions of WordPress. As it turns out, when I logged in to the Headway site to see if I was using the latest version, I got an unpleasant surprise: Headway’s most recent release of the theme framework was version 3.8.9…released in October, 2016.

Crap. It looks like Headway essentially went out of business a year and a half ago and tried to keep their customers from noticing. Rumor has it that Headway ran through all their money too fast and had to lay off almost everybody, leaving just enough of the company operational to allow them to keep collecting licensing fees through the website. This is sneaky, desperate, and underhanded.

(It’s a darned shame too, because Headway did so much right. Most WordPress page building tools are aimed at designers building small storefront sites, so they are focused on allowing designers to make each page unique, like an online brochure layout. Headway is different, because it works through the WordPress theme system. You don’t build pages, you build themes which can be applied to all your pages and blog posts at once. Yet you can also do page building by creating a unique theme variant for each page. And despite all that, it rendered pages very fast.)

So now I’ve been looking through the morass of WordPress theme frameworks — Genesis, Divi, Themify, Builder, PageLines, Ultimatum — the list goes on and on. It’s hard to tell, but some of them appear to have gone the way of Headway. Meanwhile, I’m trying stuff and experimenting.

So if you see wild theme changes here on Windypundit, now you know why.

 

Windypundit In the Age Of Trump

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I seem to be having trouble blogging. My last post was on March 28th, an even 50 days ago. I think that’s one of the longest periods I’ve gone without posting since the very early days of the blog. I blogged more frequently than this throughout the months when my parents died.

Part of the reason for the reduced blogging is that I’ve been doing small projects around the house. We never really finished moving in, so I have a lot of catching up to do — unpacking boxes, moving furniture, putting things together. It uses up my spare time.

It also doesn’t help that my day job is changing. I’m taking on additional responsibilities, and I’m spending more time having to learn about some new technologies, which uses up more of my spare time. More importantly, it uses up my mental energy. Writing Windypundit is hard work. I have trouble finding the time to start new posts, and I have trouble keeping up the momentum it takes to finish a post.

(I have a bunch of partial posts from the last few weeks — taking The Federalist to task for attacking Elizabeth Nolan Brown, the dangers of weakening Section 230 protections, explaining why I’m skeptical of that study suggesting auto insurance pricing is racist, ranting about Jack Marshall’s ugly values, analysis of the Trump “tax plan,” a point that climate activists missed in Bret Stephens’s NYT piece, and a multi-part series on how insurance works. Some of those might still see daylight, but most are already too stale.)

There’s one other cause for my lack of blogging: The presidency of Donald Trump. Or rather, the difficulty I have in dealing coherently with the presidency of Donald Trump. I tend to blog about what might be called policy issues, and those aren’t much in the news these days.

That’s no surprise. My position has consistently been that Trump is a narcissistic sociopath. It’s not easy to talk about Trump’s policy preferences because he doesn’t have any beyond doing whatever is good for him. Heck, his “tax plan” consisted of a one page summary of provisions and some details given by his staff, and the provisions with the most details were the ones that would give Trump himself a big tax break.

I don’t know how to talk about policy ideas so vague and incomplete. Other pundits filled in the holes, but some of their assumptions were contradictory. Anything I wrote would be dependent on way too many assumptions to be useful.

The Republican healthcare plan was a lot more detailed — an actual bill before Congress — but even then it didn’t offer a solution to any of the major problems with Obamacare, nor did it deliver on Trump’s promises of much better healthcare plans. It just didn’t seem like serious policy, and that didn’t seem worth writing about, especially since non-serious policy could change when the wind blows.

In any case, both the tax plan and the healthcare plan were met with scathing responses from throughout the punditocracy. Much of the response was partisan, a little too much of it was crazy, and some of it I strongly disagreed with it. But all too often, by the time I caught up to the news cycle, everyone else had already said what I wanted to say, or close enough that I didn’t feel motivated to write.

That’s not to say there aren’t some real policy issues. Jeff Sessions all by himself is ramping up the war on drugs and shutting down criminal justice reform. I could certainly say things about that. But I’ve been saying things about that for a decade and a half, and everything I want to say right now boils down to “it’s very, very, very, very wrong to hurt people for committing consensual crimes.” That’s what I always say, and it doesn’t seem to be helping.

So right now it feels like everything I could write about anything going on is basically pointless.

I’m sure I’ll get over it. In part, I need to find better sources of news and information. I now realize that much of my daily skim was geared toward covering the liberal/leftist/Democratic establishment. I need to reorient my reading to find more interesting approaches to the sins of the conservative/right/Republican establishment. I’m not talking only about sites that attack the issues of the right. Sites that smugly defend them are just as useful for my purposes.

I also need to get away from the news cycle’s breathless coverage of every single Trump controversy. Potential scandals involving Russians, Comey, and Flynn may very well have an important, even devastating, effect on the Trump presidency, but they’re not what I want to blog about. I’m sure there are important policy changes going on — immigration is an obvious example — and I need to find out more about them.

Any suggestions?

Whither Windypundit?

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Regular readers may know that I bought a house back in June and moved out to the suburbs, where we’re still getting used to a new way of living. Our condo needed a bit of work before we could sell it, but we finally got it ready and on the market in September, and we closed on the sale last month.

That brings me to a disturbing question: Since Chicago is “the windy city” and I no longer have any connection to Chicago…am I still the Windypundit? Is it time to change the name of the blog? Granted, Windypundit has never been about Chicago any more than Vodkapundit has been about vodka or Iowa Hawk Blog has been about birds of prey, but there was always a connection. Until now.

And that just has me thinking about the blog, which has been going on for a very long time now, and seems to be increasingly irrelevant. (For Christ’s sake, my last post advocated a type of “white genocide,” and nobody even bothered to call me a “cuck.”) Maybe it’s time to make some changes…

Should I change the name? “Windypundit” doesn’t exactly fill the reader with breathless anticipation of greatness.

Should I start a whole new blog? I tried that once before, when Rogier van Bakel, Rick Horowitz, and I tried to restart Rogier’s old blog in a new location (we even got Maggie McNeill in on it!), but after an initial burst of activity and buzz, it eventually ground to a halt.

Should I join another group blog, if anyone would have me? I tried doing that at When Falls the Coliseum, but I never got involved enough to post regularly. Somebody invited me to contribute to Being Libertarian, but I don’t know if that would be right for me.

So, as the year draws to a close and I contemplate the future of the blog, does anyone have suggestions? I’ve already thought of releasing all new posts as videos of bikini models reading them out loud, but any other suggestions would be given full consideration.

(And if you want to send me audition videos for the bikini thing…)

Going Dark

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I’m going dark in an hour or so. In preparation for the big move tomorrow, I’m about to shut down and pack up the home computers and tear down our internet connection. Shortly after posting this message, for the first time in over 15 years, my wife and I will no longer have broadband internet access.

Except for an iPad and both our iPhones with LTE, along with the Kindle Fire and Lenovo ThinkPad we have tethered to them, of course, which should last us until we can use the WiFi I setup in the new home. Because we’re not savages.

But other than that, totally dark.

See you on the other side…

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