Technical Crisis Averted - Lesson Learned (Patreon)

Dear Patrons,

I wanted to share a very important experience I just went through to make sure nobody else makes the same mistake. A few weeks ago I purchased new upgrades for my desktop computer, mainly the 3090 Ti NVIDIA Graphics Card and Ryzen 9 CPU. There were also other upgrades such as more memory, solid state drives, and power supply but those aren't an issue to add.

Last week I brought my desktop computer in to a hardware specialist who builds and repairs computers so I could add all these upgrades in. In theory, this should have been a simple upgrade, the only caveat was that we needed to upgrade the BIOS on the motherboard to support all this new hardware. We did just that and installed Windows onto a separate solid state drive since you can't use the same boot drive (unless you want to wipe it) when installing a new CPU. That seemed to work and everything was going well. The hardware specialist installed the rest of the parts and the computer looked beautiful.

We booted up the computer and went through all of the Windows default setup settings and everything seemed fine. I was so happy to see that my computer had been upgraded and pulled out my wallet to pay the hardware specialist for his work. However, just as I did that I noticed the screen on the monitor that my computer was plugged into went black and showed the popup message "NO SIGNAL". As soon as I saw that my heart sank, I knew something went wrong.

I pointed out that there was something wrong and we examined the computer. All of the hardware was professionally assembled and should have worked fine in theory. However, that clearly wasn't the case. I asked him to restart the computer. He tried to press the power button, but it still lit up as if it were still on. He then tried holding down the power button which is supposed to force shut down the computer, but that didn't work either. The only thing we could do was pull the power plug. This was not a good sign. We tried replicating the issue and it kept happening every time, Windows would crash in a matter of seconds every time the computer booted up and we couldn't shut down the computer.

At this point I was horrified. I just realized that I don't have a backup computer for rendering (my laptop is NOT suitable for intense iRay rendering). In my head I starting panicking that I just completely screwed myself over and had no other way to work on my projects. I asked the hardware specialist to see if he could figure out what was wrong and that I would come back at a later time to pick up the computer.

This weekend I couldn't sleep. I kept rolling around in the bed in a sweat, thinking about all the worst case scenarios. I was so mad at myself too, this was something I could have easily prevented if I had just built a brand new computer from scratch instead of trying to upgrade my current computer. With all these thoughts running through my head it was no wonder I wasn't able to sleep.

Later that weekend I received a text message from the hardware specialist at 2AM in the morning, he found out that my current motherboard had issues with the new powerful hardware (even with the BIOS updates) and that I would need to supply a more suitable motherboard. I was wide awake in my bed and responded immediately to him, saying I would order a new motherboard and other parts to build a brand new computer from scratch. While we're waiting for those parts to arrive I told him to put all the old hardware back into my machine so I at least have something to work with in the meantime.

Today the hardware specialist let me know he was able to put the old parts back into my computer and everything should be back to normal. As soon as my work shift ended I rushed to pick up the computer and came home. I'm currently typing this post on the same computer while rendering a scene in the background. So far everything seems fine and I hope it stays that way. I can at least work with this until the new computer is built.

The lesson I hope you take away from this is that for big upgrades to your computer such as the CPU or GPU you might as well just build a whole new computer. You'll need a new motherboard, power supply, and other things in order to support those upgrades and chances are something will go wrong since technology always finds a way to screw you over. Always have a backup machine to work with, especially if you're a content creator.

I'm feeling much better now that I know my current computer seems to be stable. I can now get back to creating content and it's a great feeling knowing I'm not completely screwed. Please don't make the same mistake I did!

-FH