Where to begin..

I met this girl while working, this is a common thing, & she sat in my car & complained about her baby’s daddy & all the nonsense & while being far too honest with me, I realize she was on crack. No seriously, literally on crack. She looked like a normal person. Anyway, I got her safely home & told her to control her money.

Married with Children started streaming on Youtube & so far it’s continued running 24/7.

420 viewers

picked up some skins for cheap, you know I’m addicted to sugar & Fortnite haha

I bought yet another Batman skin, this time for my alt account. I gifted it to myself from my OG account.

I also picked up the drift pack & the transformers pack.

I spend way too much on this game.

So yes, the car jacking. A couple of people ran up on me while I was walking to my vehicle & they had a gun & demanded the keys so I gave them the keys & they left & then the police recovered the vehicle. Fortunately I had only put 2 gallons in the car because I was in a hurry & had only just fueled up & was on the way to a meeting when it happened. It’s still being investigated. I need to fill out a form & have been behind ever since it happened because this basically only resulted in multiple expenditures for me. Although, I did meet a new friend.

Speaking of new friends, I got an intern! An intern began working part time two days a week at my computer repair shop.

With the summer here & gone my mom continued the work on her house. It’s definitely come a long way. I did not have time to really make it down there much this year. This is a Google Maps image & I’ll take a photo when I’m there to show more of what’s been done. You can probably tell the porch, windows, siding, roof, trim, gutters, everything is new. They also had remodeled the living room & removed the old stairs & my uncle built a new staircase to the second floor. The old one was fine, but the new staircase isn’t so steep. Anyway, she’s working on the kitchen & the entire second floor. Maybe she eventually gets to remodeling the basement.

That’s what my Grandfather did last with his old place decades ago. I remember I was a kid & he had said he was going to remodel the basement & he did an excellent job, it went from an unfinished basement to a complete basement with a TV room, laundry room, storage, hallways, bathroom, shower, & an additional two bedrooms. Later when I got older he & I remodeled his porch & it became yet another room for TV & poker.

This isn’t the first house my mom remodeled, but it was the least prepared property & a huge project so the time it’s taken is justifiable in that regard.

Just so much going on, I’ll try to find time to do an update on some of the machines I’ve been repairing. I have another website for my business which actually has photos of some of that work, but the most recent machine I am fixing cost about $4000 & I found that MSI put in thermal pads that began to deteriorate & turn into liquid & they leaked into the M.2 SSDs & I’m fixing that currently.

He’s got a 4080 & yeah no issue with the CPU or GPU & I was worried it might be the M.2 after the testing but now I see what it is.

I should have checked it first after he described the symptoms but I have a process & his machine was a beast so I didn’t want to take it apart unless I had to. This happened to BOTH SSDs but I’ve cleaned them up & we’ll run some further tests. Beware MSI owners, check those thermal pads. They should dry up & disintegrate if anything, not turn to liquid as was the case with these MSI pads.

Also, my friend Aaron gave me another TV! It’s a 55″ 4K TV.

I’m not sure what I’ll do with it yet, but I’ll figure something out.

Alienware Liquid Cooler FAILED

Yeah the old cooler was a piece of crap. I was able to fit this cool master in there & that’s plenty of cooling for this i7-7800x. I removed the radiator & put the chassis fan back in place. This runs even cooler than it did before & actually what happened was the old radiator did what they always do in these, it failed. They had a small radiator, look at how there appears to be no room in here for one, well, they managed it, but it ran out of coolant, overheated, & actually the ram bank next to the CPU even failed!

Fortunately for the customer, the three other banks work & he only wants 32GB of DDR4 anyway. So, he’s upgrading to two 16s since not only did the ram slot fail, the ram stick failed too. I imagine it got really hot being right next to the overheating CPU & radiator & yeah, fortunately, all is not lost, he’ll replace that workstation memory with some G.Skill gaming memory. The G.Skill memory has heatsinks, not that it will overheat anymore because this new configuration will be vastly superior to what Dell had in there. I’ll install that ram when it arrives later today.

It’s funny that Dell decided to save money by putting workstation memory in their Alienware gaming PCs. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, I’ve also reinstalled Windows since that was corrupted. He should probably upgrade his M.2 but it’s working & he has 2TBs in other drives.

Prior to this I had a guy’s PC he was using as a racing simulator in. I basically updated the BIOS & the AMD chipset + AMD graphics drivers & it ran great. It was still crashing for him but I advised him to lower his settings since his card was really only spec’d to run at a maximum 30 fps at 1440 & perhaps 60 fps at 1080. Sometimes there are hardware limitations like that which people do not foresee. As with this Alienware, it’s running a 1080 TI, which is a bit outdated, but the PC was still worth fixing.

That’s the majority of the machines I get. Sometimes I want to take more photos & make more notes & explain everything I’ve done, but I just don’t have time to do that. I used to keep paperwork, physical paperwork, starting in the 90s, each machine had a sheet of paper I’d then file away. I used to have just thousands of these but those files were destroyed long ago.