Are you a male Teuscher?

Are you a real Teuscher?

There’s one sure-fire way to find out if you are a real, true male Teuscher. What is it? Good looks? (nah) Exceptionally smart? (not that either) Superior Physical Acumen? (You were kidding with that one right?!?)

Nope, the answer is this:

Now most of you would look at that and either say:

A) What’s that?!?
B) I see the Intel sticker, so it must be a computer part?
C) Hey, that’s a computer processor (Most likely this is the least common response)

Well, if you were a real, true male Teuscher you would look at that and say:
“Hey, that’s the Intel the Core 2 Quad Q9450 2.66Ghz processor with 1333Mhz FSB and 12MB Cache!”

Now let’s get to the story…

A week and a half ago the boys were complaining that the computer sounded “funny”. Stephanie shut it off and in passing mentioned to Brian that she had tried to restart it, but it was making “funny noises” and wouldn’t boot up. (Ok, side note…”funny noises” isn’t a good description to give for troubleshooting, you need to say ‘it’s making grinding noises’, ‘it’s making a high pitched noise”, not “funny” noises – alright…back to the story). Brian decided to take a look at it and after troubleshooting and diagnosis Brian reported that the motherboard had gone bad.

So the computer is dead, that means time to upgrade right?!? Music to Brian’s ears. He immediately set off looking at components and pricing them out. You see, when you have to upgrade your computer you can’t simply go out to Costco or Sams or Best Buy or even some independent computer store and purchase a system. No, you have to build it from scratch. Not only that, because we built our last system so long ago, the type of memory, the video card, the connectors, the case, everything was pretty much outdated. Brian was in heaven. Stephanie was under the impression of “oh, we’ll just buy some of these little things and we’ll be on the way” – oh how wrong she was!

As most of you know, Brian works at Intel. One of the benefits he gets is discounted pricing on Processors (the Brain’s of the computer for those not familiar). Not only that, but they have a Chip Loaner program wherein Intel “Loans” a chip to employees for them to use in their home machines. The Loaned chip is free, and hey, you can’t beat free, so we decided to get the loaner chip. Of course, it didn’t hurt that the loaner chip was one of these high-end processors. This is quite the departure from previously built systems of ours which ran on the cheapest items that could be found. Of course, when we found out what processor we were going to get, we then needed to buy a new motherboard, new CPU fan, new Case (it has to have fans inside to keep things cool), new memory (upgrading to twice the memory at half the cost), a new video card, and a new hard drive (their so cheap, it just makes sense). They are to be delivered on Monday.

Well, Brian finally got the processor from work on Friday. He came home and was so proud of it. Stephanie sort of looked at it and gave that “wow, that’s small” while Brian gave her the “do you know what this is? It’s the Core 2 Quad Q9450 2.66Ghz processor with 1333Mhz FSB and 12MB Cache”…Stephanie just looked at him and said “so I’ll still be able to read my email and surf the web with that right?”…She is definitely not a male Teuscher!

In a future blog posting we’ll make sure to cover step by step the building process and we will be sure to include all reports of yelling, screaming, slamming, swearing that may occur during such event!