How to NOT build a PC in 200 bucks!

Something caught onto me, may be some old d-i-y testosterone still lying around. And then I was just infatuated with this idea of building my own PC. The primary reason is that I'm just sick tired of using the macbook, its all shiny and sleek, but you can't tweak. Well that's as bad a reason could be.

So here I went off in my pursuit of building a decently powerful machine in as little as 200 bucks. I had few things in mind

1. Small form factor
2. Should not suck on my patience like my laptop

Getting point 2 covered was not much of an effort, at least so I thought. So I went web-shopping to get the nuts and bolts. After spending few hours spread across couple of days I realized three things that you shouldn't miss

a. Keep your configuration which "sounds" like made this year aka bleeding edge
b. Get the cheapest one in that
c. Find the one which comes with free shipping!

Point c is very important, you end up getting better stuff for lesser price overall. So based on this I got a dual core processor, 2 gigs of memory, 320g of hdd and a dvd writer and a motherboard which is reasonable enough. (I'm not a gaming person, so I skipped the graphics card and settled for on-board, otherwise the budget would have been over-board).

Now comes the tough problem of point 1. I wanted my desktop to be portable and not look like hey-I'm-from-the-90's boring box. Small things come at a price and I had to shell out a good 50 bucks for a compact case. A little more could have got me really cute cases, but I wasn't building a Wall-E per se.

After the groceries got home, I started with recipe, which last time I had covered in a flat half an hour. But surprise, this time it took me good 2 weeks to get it to work :( Two of the one-in-10-or-100-thousand things happened, damn two of them, how bad is my luck! The RAM didn't work, cause some pompous companies like Corsair make higher frequency sticks than what the spec says (running at 675Mhz instead of 667Mhz) and I learnt it the hard way. I got a Kingston (1000Mhz) finally which is doing great.

And finally I had a working desktop, or was it...the second coming was the the WD hdd, it was just plain dead, and getting it replaced took ten days.

And finally I had a working desktop, or was it...no the Windows CD was not right. I had to replace it.

And finally I had a working desktop, or was it...no the cheap wifi card that I bought doesn't work. I gave up trying to make it work, and settled for a shared internet connection through my laptop :(

And finally I had a working desktop, yes this time for real, with good old Windows(which has caught a malware and already become unsuable as I write, which made me to write this blog in gmail's composer) and the bling with the greeny Opensuse running KDE 4.2.

If you are interested in the details, the approximate break-up

AMD Athlon X2 4200+ & AM2 socket mobo - 90
2G Kingston - 20
320G WD - 50
Slim case - 50
DVD RW - 25
USB Wifi - 15

Round about 250 bucks..not bad eh? So what if my macbook serves as the router.

Mac quack

This post is for the make benefit of fellow mac users.

I have a dual boot system, with Mac OS X and Ubuntu running. I had read somewhere that you need to turn off journaling on Mac's HFS+ filesystem to use it from Linux, so I had religiously done that. Yesterday, I used something from my Mac volume in Linux, hadn't done any writes. Today, when I booted OS X, it just refused to go beyond the initial grey boot time screen. I gave it 20 minutes, then I shut if off. I tried it again, gave it 1hr 30min, my patience called off, and I again shut it off. If something was taking so much time at boot, I was pretty sure there was some pain in the filesystem, and turning journaling off was causing hopelessly long recovery times. But I hadn't expected to wait this long! It was getting ridiculous.

Then, I booted Linux, looked for a possible fix. Found a feasible solution, on Ubuntu forums, it was a bit broken so reproducing it here with fixes. Run the following script as su to fix inconsistent hfs+ volumes. You need build tools and libssl-dev to use this, I had to learn it the hard way.

cd /usr/src
mkdir hfsplus_support
wget http://gentoo.osuosl.org/distfiles/diskdev_cmds-332.14.tar.gz
wget http://www.mythic-beasts.com/resources/appletv/mb_boot_tv/diskdev_cmds-332.14.patch.bz2
tar zxf diskdev_cmds-332.14.tar.gz
bunzip2 -c diskdev_cmds-332.14.patch.bz2 | patch -p0
cd diskdev_cmds-332.14
make -f Makefile.lnx
cp fsck_hfs.tproj/fsck_hfs /sbin/fsck.hfsplus
cd /sbin
ln -s mkfs.hfsplus mkfs.hfs
ln -s fsck.hfsplus fsck.hfsn -s fsck.hfsplus fsck.hfs

Then do a "fsck.hfsplus /dev/your_mac_vol". It will take some time, depending upon how much of the fs is screwed, but much much lesser than OS X's boot time fsck. My volume was repaired in around 10 minutes. Reboot, and your shiny OS X should run like a happy kid after a nap.

I simply can't believe that OS X is incapable of fixing its own stuff. If you read the FAT fs code in Linux kernel, somewhere on the top there are two interesting words "fscking l'users", they need to be replicated somewhere.

The Milky Muse

As I had said earlier there are tons of things to write on..but now they have become like pending court cases which are never looked at again. Things should be written when they are fresh. Recreating those experiences in the mind to get the right words out is a difficult difficult thing. After some blogger's block, which I do get very often, thanks to my usually uneventful life...I thought I should write something about the diwali gift I got for myself (yes I'm that bad :P)...a nice, sleek, slim....hmmm...let me put this in better words:

The milky muse...xx99^ bucks
Bumper discount thanks to my friend*, 25%
Ecstasy, joy, pleasure that some dreams in life come true...absolutely priceless!

There are some things in life money can buy, for everything else...no no master, visa, american express won't help. Try consulting the Oracle or H G Wells if you are not technologically challenged...I should be writing in more wakeful hours, or I end up getting disoriented like this...

More on my experiences with the machine soon..unless that too turns into a pending case. nx, it was a pleasure running you, thanks for being there, all the time. You are still the best laptop around, other than the muse offcourse :). The young apprentice will be instructed to take good care of you.

^prices not to be revealed :P
*Karthik, thanks maga! I owe you one, big time.