Back in November/December I decided to snag a 240GB SSD during the holiday sales. I did a fresh install of Windows 7 and reinstalled or updated all of my drivers and yea, my boot was bequickened and Chrome opened instantaneously and a variety of things were made a bit faster. But. Either the new drive configuration or the newer drivers for onboard audio or some damn other thing introduced an audio hiss into my surround sound.

Boooooooooooooooo.

I put up with it for a while, but eventually snagged an ASUS sound card for $27 to fix the problem and hopefully upgrade my sound a bit. Okay, cool. But. While installing the sound card my screwdriver slipped and bounced off my GPU's heatsink. Ever since, anything GPU intensive (mainly games, not video) would lock up my system.

Boooooooooooooooo.

I put up with the new glitch for a couple of days, then boned up on the last couple generations of vid cards and hopped on Ebay. I was trying for a HD 5870 or GTX560, but ended up with a decent deal on a HD 6870 (paradoxically a scoonch less powerful than the 5870). When it arrived today, however, I discovered that it was practically bigger than my PC (ATX mid-tower). It didn't look like there was any way it would fit.

Boooooooooooooooo.

I ended up disassembling half the PC, but I found a way to make everything fit. I had to pull out the bottom drive bay, pull all the RAM sticks so I could slide my hard drive into the middle drive bay, rearrange all the wires, and screw my SSD (or its 3.5" adapter tray, anyway) directly to the bottom of the case because there was nowhere else to put it (there's a card reader in the other slot of the middle drive bay). So now my PC is finally back in full working order and then some. The SSD brought my overall Windows Experience Index up to 7.1, and the new GPU took my vid scores from 7.3 to 7.8 (0.1 shy of the max score for a Windows 7 machine).