I’m cursed I tell you, cursed.

It’s a well known fact in my circle of friends not to let me build PCs. Something always seems to happen. I’d guess I have about a 30-35% success rate on the first try that PC’s I build work.

One of my major goals this week on vacation was to rebuild a few machines, including:

1. My server
2. Athlon 64 box
3. Music backup box which (I think) had a bad video card
4. Rebuild my wireless network, including my wife’s laptop with a MIMO card

Well, I’ve had a 25% success rate this week. Some vacation.

To recap:

The server: I’ve watched the server die a slow death all week. From the first hard drive failure 6 months ago, I’ve seen the CMOS reset, the BIOS reset a few times, and now booting from the DVD drive isn’t working. I looked into buying a 1U rackmount server today to replace it, but can’t seem to get wife approval yet.

Athlon 64: Swapped out processors and video card (got a sweet deal on a 6800 OC), now getting a 25 or 52 error on the Abit uGuru machine. Need to take the memory out and troubleshoot. Figures.

Music backup box: Success! Swapped out video cards (took the 4200 out of the Athlon 64 since it got a 6800) and bam, no more lockups. Yay.

Wireless Network & Kelly’s laptop: Success and then oops. Wireless network swapped out, got WEP up and running, and went to install the MIMO card in Kelly’s laptop (my old one). Followed directions, installed the drivers first, then put the card in the PCMCIA slot, and the card wouldn’t power on or be recognized. Very weird, as especially for the last year I had been running an Atheros card in that laptop when it had been running Linux as Broadcom built-in wireless sucks. Flashed the bios, and bam, machine won’t power on. HP told me to take it in for service. Wife not happy with me at all, as she wanted it on our trip home this weekend.

Success rate this week: 25%. To top it all off, I had powered off my desktop to do some cable management, and when I powered it on to go to HP’s site for support, I got 2 non-system disk errors. Was reaching for a LiveCD when I rebooted one mroe time and it came on. I was pretty livid at that point.

Moral of the story? Don’t let me touch your PC. Ever.