Hehe, I almost missed this beauty..."masculine" indeed.    Thanks for that, Dave, it's the best giggle I've had in a while.

Ps was revving.

And here I thought it was a baseball player

I have no clue what you guys are talking about lol ,i just know what looks good and i like the looks of your case starkers.Makes me wish i could make my own good luck.

Pins and needles...needles and pins. The anticipation builds!

Gloom, despair, and agony on me 
Deep, dark depression, excessive misery 
If it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all 
Gloom, despair, and agony on me

Isn't that part of the fun... the challenge to make all those components work... and then the sweet memories of all that frustration and the joy that follows when everything works!

Hi Ernie, from what I read about restoring to dissimilar hardware, Acronis doesn't load any chipset drivers but gets Windows to install the new ones for the current hardware.  I will give that a try first because the last install of Win 8.1 isn't that old and it would save having to reinstall all my proggies.  If I have to bite the bullet and do a  clean install, well so be it, at least I can get into the system to set things up, unlike yesterday when nothing went right.  It was the strangest thing, I've never had a new build behave lke that, not recognising healthy drives regardless of how nany ports and cables were tried

Thing is, the machine is up and running, so it's just a matter of getting an OS operational and I'm in business....so back to the grindstone.

But not today, I refuse to let it go that way....I'm calling the shots today, not fate nor luck...ME.

I will get around to it.... promise.  I will first have to upload them to imageshack in the morning, then I'll post some.

As for not having another absolute #*%@ of a day today... yesterday now, I spoke too feching soon, didn't I!  Went out to do some grocery shopping, which went okay, but then it all went to shit, along with my feching ice cream and other frozen goods.  Called a cab at 1.49 to pick me up outside the supermarket and take me home.  Was told there was a 20 to 30 minute wait... like fech it was.  Bastard cab didn't turn up until 5 friggin' 40pm.  I kept ringing and kept ringing to find out where the heck my frigging cab was: "car 321 is on it's way....

Twenty Five minutes later I ring back for the umpteenth time: "I was told car 321 was o it's way 25 minutes ago.... where from... feching Melbourne!!!!"   I then get a text saying car 376 was on its way.... didn't arrive.... neither did car 741.  By then I'm suffering with heat exhastion and was in desperate need of my diabetic meds, so I tell this to the operator, that all my frozen stuff had thawed and I needed to get home urgently to take some medication... 'twas still another 2 hours before I got home, by which time I was quite frazzled and rather ill, so I've done eff all about anything.  I feel a bit better now, but it's 1.45am and it can feching wait.

Anyhow, come Monday I'm going to ring the company superintendant and I'm gonna tear him a new arsehole.  Well company policy says he is responsible and the buck stops with him, so I'm going to let him have it... both barrels... and if I get no satisfaction there I will go to the state transport dept, the governing body for taxis.

Okay, rant off... for now... we'll see come Monday if it stays off.

Do remember to be in a few of those photos.

Orright, I've not been here for a couple of days because:

a; I took a medical hiatus due to feeling like crap

b; I didn't give a toss about life's doings or anything else

c; I suffered 2 days of the worst feelings of vertigo I can remember

d: I had a visitor named Raaalph and he kept pushing my head in a bucket.

e; All of the above.

If you answered e you are correct, but I'm not giving out cigars.

Anyway, some pics.....in no particular order... and not that flash, either.

But I never claimed to be a feching photographer.

A picture says a 1000 words, so nope, no feching commentary or description. 

I figure you's oughta know what's what, and if yer don't, yer got no fechin' business bein' in a puter building thread, right?

Seriously, I made some alterations/adjustments since those pics were taken, so I'll get Shaunna to take some better shots on her DSLR camera when she comes around tomorrow... cos frankly, these shots from a mobile phone are not the best

However, that's what you lot get for being impatient and demanding pics .... so go suck eggs  

I added the rear fan to the bottom and I tidied the cabling some because I wasn't satisfied with how it looked.  It just wasn't my tidiest build so I redid things to give it that starkers 'neat freak' appearance,, though I'm still not 100% happy with it... but then, there's more hardware with cabling than in previous builds, so I guess I can't have it both ways.

And that's a no, I'm sorry to say.  As fast as I run, I just can't set the timer and be in the frame by the time the flash goes off.

I'm still waiting on 2 more sticks of RAM, BTW.  They only had 2 in stock at the time, but I placed an order for 2 more and they should hopefully be in within a couple of weeks. I could have gone elsewhere and gotten it quicker, but not at the same great price, so I'm happy to wait

Anyhow, 'tis late at night in the early hours of the morning again, so I'm gonna bugger off to bed.

Boot issue?  Hmmm, the old scone don't retain shit like it used to.

The beast boots okay now except for one annoying thing... and for the life of me I haven't been able to figure it out.  Every 1st boot produces 1 long and 2 short beeps... PC fails to start up.  I have to do a reset and then the machine boots as normal the second time around. There is probably an explanation in the mobo's user manual, but I have yet to lay a hand on it in order to read that explanation.  Yup, you guessed it... in the upheaval of everything [having to move all my stuff from the man cave to upstairs] everything is a complete jumble... it's that bad that I can only find my arse if I use both hands and an anatomy chart.

Actually, I have 3 issues with which I could use some help, if anybody has any ideas.

1:  The abovementioned boot issue, which also prevents a system reboot after installing software, etc.... have to do a reset in order to reboot.

2:  I currently have 16gb of G-Skill Trident X F3-2400C10D-16GTX RAM installed but in BIOS it is registered as 1333mhz, which is nearly half of what it is supposed to be.  There is an option in BIOS to upgrade the RAM, but my RAM does not appear in the dropdown of options.  So, do I have the correct RAM but need to flash the BIOS for it to be detected correctly... or do I have 1333 RAM labeled as 2400?  How could I tell the difference, etc?

3:  I cannot connect to the internet via LAN, and nothing I have tried has resolved this issue.  The drivers for the Intel Pro100 Network Adapter are provided on the mobo installation disk but they are incompatible with Win 8.1.  I tried all the available compatability settings but no go.  I also downloaded updated versions using my laptop [which I've been using to post here] and still no joy. I'm currently trying to hunt down a wireless adapter, of which I have 3, and hopefully that will resolve my connectivity issues and allow Windows to search for compatible drivers.

My impression of the 1st Intel build in 10 years or so could be better, given these 3 annoying issues, but hopefully they'll be resolved soon and my 1st Intel experience in 10 years improves some.  I mean, it's no faster than my AMD FX8350 build at present, but then that may have something to do with the aforementioned RAM and boot issues

I'm into my 3rd day of extreme vertigo making me feel like I'm disoriented and want to puke all the time, which is not at all conducive to my accomplishing anything, much less resolving puter issues.  However, if anyone has any ideas regarding the issues above, I'd be only too pleased to try them out... gotta keep trying, I suppose.