Let this serve as a lesson...
First of all, don't panic, this has a happy ending.
If you have something really old and relatively delicate, don't try to upgrade it under any circumstances. Just gather more money and renew everything... That way you won't end up like I did.
The same day, last Thursday, a few hours after writing the report, my younger brother came to the rescue and gave me a SATA cable. Everything ok, everything fine... Without any problem I made a clone of the old hard drive on the new drive. After that I had to leave the computer unattended to do other things. Less than an hour later I came back and it was frozen... That was the last time. I tried to restart it and the computer simply never started again.
Usually, when some component of a computer has a problem, there are ways to warn about it, the motherboard emits audible alarms... Here there was no sound at all.
On Friday I took everything apart, cleaned, checked as best I could and put it back together... nothing. My only brain cell had a brilliant idea, the battery... Maybe many don't know that every computer has a battery, usually it's a simple CR 2032 battery that costs around 2 dollars. It's what the BIOS needs to keep all its data. The problem is that many people have no idea about this and the problems it can cause when the battery runs out. One of those problems is that the computer can't even start up. So I bought the damn battery... and again nothing happened.
Conclusion?... This is what I guess, I have no way to check it because I can assemble and disassemble a computer but I don't have the tools to check anything.
The failed power supply I bought probably ended up destroying the motherboard in a subtle way. The computer turned on for a while and then gave up... So with the pain in my heart, and in my pocket, I'm going to have to tighten my belt and buy a new motherboard, a processor and a RAM module.
What did you think? I was going to stop here? No fucking way. I have a mission...
But don't get your hopes up too much, I can upgrade a few things but it won't be a big improvement. It's more of an upgrade within the same range, a little bit higher but nothing too noticeable. I'm going to upgrade from an old Asus m4a78lt-m motherboard to something more modern but just as cheap. I'm going to upgrade from an Athlon II processor to a Ryzen 3 and the RAM will still be 8 gigs, just a little faster. The 2 gig GTX 1050 video card I'm using will remain unchanged for a while.
Hopefully I'll be able to buy everything tomorrow and maybe by Tuesday or Wednesday I'll have everything back in order. And as you can see, there are no dramas regarding the game because I now have 2 copies of everything. One on the old disk and one on the new one.
Anyway, if anything comes up, I'll keep you posted. I'm using an old laptop that I bought for my mother several years ago... I don't have anything new XD
Comments (2)
Ah, man. Though luck, that! Well, glad you at least got backups of the game - tbh, I would even advise to get some of it into a safe place in the cloud some day, so you won't lose your progress when some fresh sh*t hits the fan ^^ And now I feel even less bad about giving you a few bucks of mine. Because while I don't have the biggest greatest Ryzen either, I've had a Ryzen for some time now, and my Athlon years are long gone. IDE and Athlon... almost nostalgic! Just see it as an investment into the future, and in a few months hopefully your Patreon will have paid it back :D
The game itself is not a problem. The problem is the "My Library" folder inside DAZ. That's where the really important stuff is. All the models, all the assets in use and several that I need to use in the future. All the scenes in their original format and also the original renders. Right now that folder in my case already has almost 60 gigabytes of information. With my upload speed I can't upload that anywhere. But as I said, I have two copies right now. On the bright side of all this, I will now have support for SSD drives and I no longer need to buy another motherboard for when I can upgrade my video card. The processor really doesn't matter in this job. The important thing is to have a video card with the largest amount of RAM possible and of course the more CUDA the better. At the current rate, in about two or three months I will have already recovered tomorrow's expense and I will be able to continue saving to change the video card and perhaps have an SSD for backup just in case. Thank you :D