[ The following concerns a paid campaign currently running on the site. ]

By David Ponce

So that there’s the finished Home Office PC I’ve been building over the last few weeks. To get there, the final hardware-related step involved setting up a RAID 1 array. I thought it would be a walk in the park.

Not so much fun, my friends. Not so much. Pasted below are the first 3 of the 17 distinct steps it took to get RAID up and running on this system. For the rest, hit the link below. Oh, and if you do visit that site, notice how the default settings in the WordPress installation turned Step 8 into a smiley face. Fun stuff.

1) Before you start, this is the most important step: Go to nvidia.com (on another computer, of course) and download drivers for your motherboard. Extract the files and put the entire “SATA_IDE” folder on a thumb drive.

2) On the new PC’s first boot, enter the BIOS. Usually pressing the “Del” key will take you there.

3) Most BIOS settings differ, but sound similar. In this case, you had to navigate to “Advanced > Onboard Devices > SATA Mode select > Select RAID mode.

[ Setting Up RAID 1 ]

[ The following concerns a paid campaign currently running on the site. ]

By David Ponce

So here I was, thinking my low-qual video was at least moderately entertaining, despite being, well… horribly low quality (not so hot for an overhyped N96 video, to tell you the truth). But the more I look at it, the more I think it cruel and unusual punishment to subject you to any more of me this way. So instead, I’ll just include a little gallery of blurry iPhone pics after the jump. If you want to see the full article, with descriptions and stuff, hit the link at the end.

Does anyone here think I have an obsession with low quality?

[ Building an Home Office PC ]

By David Ponce

The PC-building saga continues. So far I’ve installed the motherboard, connected the front panel and power supply and inserted the RAM. Fun stuff. To see me basically saying what I just wrote, watch the above clip.

To see a bunch of pictures of the installation process, follow the link below.

[ Building A Home Office PC To Put Norton On It ]

[ This article concerns a paid campaign currently running on the site. ]

I’ll preempt any negative comments right off the bat: I know there aren’t enough pics and that the ones I do have suck. But I’m no artist/photographer, nor do I play one on TV. For now, the pictures I’m including after the jump represent my modest attempt at capturing the “rush” of unboxing parts for the Home Office PC I’m building as part of the Symantec campaign (previous coverage). Later in the series, I’ll have better ones (heck, even a video or two), but for now, this is it.

To be fair, there isn’t all that much excitement in this particular unboxing. It’s not like it’s a new MacBook, or anything that’s been delicately or ornately packaged. They’re PC parts. Yay.

Still, there’s the pic above, and four more after the jump. After all that, you have a link to the article with a little commentary.

[ Unboxing Article ]

[ This article concerns a paid campaign currently running on the site. ]

By David Ponce

Alright, so this Home Office PC (which I talked about last week) is coming a little bit closer to reality. I appreciated your help and would have loved to take your advice guys… but being from the windswept glacial regions of the North (Canada), NewEgg was not an option for me. I went with TigerDirect, and below is my shopping list.

One Acer X223WBD 22″ Widescreen LCD Monitor – 5ms, 2500:1, (WSXGA+) 1680×1050, DVI, Black

XFX GeForce 8200 Motherboard CPU Bundle – AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ Processor 2.40GHz Retail

Two Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 1000GB Hard Drives – 7200RPM, 32MB, Serial ATA-300, OEM

OCZ SLI-Ready Dual Channel 4096MB PC6400 DDR2 800MHz Memory (2×2048MB)

Power Up Black 336 ATX Mid-Tower Case with Front USB, Audio Ports and 450-Watt Power Supply

Ultra X-Wind Aluminum Socket K8/AM2 CPU Cooling Fan

HP DVD1070i 20X SATA Multiformat DVD Writer – With Lightscribe Retail

Brother MFC Printer

SATA Cables

To find out how much I paid for each item and to understand why I picked some elements rather than others, hit the link at the bottom of this article.

Also, you might notice there’s no keyboard, mouse or webcam. I could have bought these right away, but I’ll wait for the mail-in rebates. I got my own for now.

[ My Home Office PC Shopping List ]