Rebuilding the home PC on a budget

I purchased an Antec TruePower 550 power supply today, but unfortunately that didn’t solve the BSOD issue, so it looks like I’ll be rebuilding the computer completely. As I’ve already got a decent server for more serious computing tasks, my aim is to do this as economically as I can. I’ve come up with the following list:

I’ll need to add a video card, as my two existing monitors only have VGA input (eg. the motherboard’s DVI-D won’t be suitable).

Rockin' the Lobster

I thought it was high time I wrote about how much I’m enjoying being part of LobsterPot Solutions. Since joining Rob and Ben about 6 months ago, I’ve had the opportunity to work with a range of clients on an interesting selection of problems utilising technologies such as:

• SQL Server
• SQL Analysis Services
• SQL Data Mining
• SQL Server Integration Services
• SQL Reporting Services
• Pivot Viewer
• ASP.NET MVC
• JQuery
• WPF
• Silverlight
• PowerShell
• .NET 4.0

Not bad!

I think it’s fair to say SQL Server and Business Intelligence (BI) are LobsterPot’s bread and butter (or should that be seafood bisque?!), but I also really appreciate the variety of tasks I’ve worked on. To complete the 3 course meal (following the food theme!), the company continues to hire talented staff. Roger (Mr SharePoint) Noble joined us in May and I’m sure he won’t be the last as demand for BI expertise increases.

Another thing that I like is LobsterPot’s commitment to staff professional development – from in-house training and conference attendance to user group participation.

Now I’m looking forward to seeing what the next 6 months bring!

BSOD Stop 0x00000116 in nvlddmkm.sys

Upon returning from TechEd, I went to power up my trusty old workstation (an aging Intel D865PERL-based machine), however it didn’t start up at all. After double-checking that it was actually plugged in properly I suspected that the power supply may be the culprit.

I’d had a similar problem with the kid’s PC a while back. I’d bought a new replacement SHAW PSU and it worked for a time, but had subsequently started freezing for no reason, so it had been put aside.

I took the new PSU out of that PC and dropped it into my workstation. Turning on the power got an immediate response – fans whirring and all the right sounds coming from the machine. Everything looked good until the after the “Starting Windows” screen disappeared. After a long pause I was greeted by nasty BSOD:

STOP 0x00000116 (0x876c5008, 0x90835640, 0x00000000, 0x00000002)

nvlddmkm.sys

I could boot the system in Safe mode, but as soon as I allowed it to reboot normally it would BSOD again. Windows 7 Action Center tries to be helpful and suggest I go to the NVidia website to download a new driver that fixes the problem. A nice idea except that the GeForce FX-based graphics card that this machine uses was last supported by driver version 96.85 from 17th October 2006 (which I was already using).

Researching this error I came across this thread. I tried the suggestion of adding the TdrLevel DWORD value to the registry but unfortunately the BSOD remained.

So the problem is somehow related to the graphics driver. Quite bizarre as I’ve never had problems like this before. The only thing that changed was the PSU. This made me suspect that maybe the new PSU was also problematic. That might well explain why the kid’s PC also froze for no reason too.

So what to do? Buy another (better quality?) PSU in the hope that it will resolve the BSOD, or go the full hog and upgrade this circa 2003 system with something a little more modern.