Almost a Silver Surfer

[asknights]

Hello, after much deliberation, a failed power supply and 4 years of continuous and faithful service, I finally swapped out my old Mesh PC for a Shiny New Black Elite Extreme QX G80 Model. It was this reliability that made me return to Mesh.

I received the Machine at the beginning of January on the day Mesh said it would arrive, though the original spec describes an Asus main board it came with an EVGA main board, but that’s no problem though, reading specs for the main board it is more than capable.

I eagerly unpacked the PC from the box checked everything was present, This is when my OBE (out of the box experience) score dropped a little, Missing G15 keyboard and G7 Mouse, This was quickly solved by customer services, there was a supply shortage of these items which would follow later.

No problem I thought I have the USB mouse and Keyboard
from my previous machine. OBE slightly dented but still intact.

I plugged the Mouse, Keyboard and power cord; turned on the power, here we go I thought I will soon be using a machine that has probably 10 times the power of my previous machine.

Up it boots, runs trough the Post, no problems, starts Windows and starts the initial start-up, good I thought, won't be long now until I see the performance of my new investment.

Ouch!! The Keyboard or Mouse not responding, nothing at all, ah!! Of course the drivers would not have loaded for the USB so Windows would not recognise them yet.

Out comes the Legacy Mouse and Legacy Keyboard, you know the ones I mean; they have those funny round plugs on the end . I forced the PC off. Plugged in the Legacy units and presto all worked, was able to setup and activate Windows.

Plugged in the USB Keyboard, and Mouse, still no joy, instead of the new hardware prompts, I got nothing and by this time I could not phone support as it was past there hours. I know my usb Mouse and keyboard work as I had been using them on a laptop just hours earlier so it must be the USB ports on the machine, So I plugged in a USB memory stick, Windows still did not recognise it.

Rebooted to the Bios, and went through the options, boy are there a lot on option on the NVIDIA SLI Main boards a little scary I thought. Investigating the option I found the problem the USB support had been turned of in the Bios

OBE Score down two more notches.

Every thing fine after that, Installed some third person games Tomb raider legend, boy is it worth having two top notch graphic cards and processor, The Performance is just amazing.

OBE Score restored

That is until I installed Splinter Cell , the Game crashed over and over, Though not a fault of the Machine apparently it is a very buggy game and does not like the G8800 series cards. it is what happened after that. Window would not boot at all just kept blue screening, even after trying to roll back Windows.

Ouch!! Double Ouch!! OBE is now zero, can't phone support as it is a weekend, Panic!. what can be done. F10, I thought, that will recover the machine to the original state. No such luck, The recovery Software could not find a valid widows installation, no matter what I tried.

OBE now less than rock bottom, kick the cat time

I scoured the all the forums and came across one on NVIDIA, some NVIDIA board manufactures had reports of SATA disc being corrupted because of a bug, in the bios; may be this is my problem I thought.

Ah! I have the CD that Mesh supplied with the machine an Widows OEM instillation, Thank you Mesh if only all PC manufactures would supply a Windows install Disc.

As I am going to install Vista when it arrives and the F10 prompt clearly did not work, I re-partioned the drive, formatted it and reinstalled Windows using the supplied CD. After a couple of hours I had Windows backup , running and on line, downloaded all the latest NVIDIA drivers and the Sata patch from EVGA.
I now have a stable and running PC also I managed to get Splinter Cell working of sorts and the NVIDIA drivers are still a little buggy, these can only get better and hopefully more stable once Vista has arrived. Oh and the G15 Keyboard and MX Revolution (G7 replacement) has arrived, though the G15 seems to be faulty, cant use ;’#nml keys they just won’t work , but that’s another story

Even though I have a little trouble with the Machine, it’s been the configuration and software not the hardware (apart from the G15 keyboard) that has caused most of the problems, I suppose that the pitfalls of purchasing Hardware at the cutting edge of technollogy and which thankfully was easily dealt with.

My faith in the reliability of Mesh built PC and the OBE score now back to 100% and hopefully this will increase once NVIDIA releases Vista drivers for their hardware.

Over all the Hardware is worth every penny, and I am sure will last as long as my previouse machine.


Sorry I have ranted on longer that I intended, it must be an age thing.

[dave87]

Hey & Welcome to Hexus

Have you looked at the MESH Support forum? Might be the best place to voice any comments, though I admit, that was a good read

Dave

[Jonny]

Hi there!

I'm sure a Mod can move this for you. Welcome, though!

I'm Jonny