You can always use it as a brick to put through the manufacturers window if it breaks 
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I obtained a longer cable. So today I powered the beast up for the first time.
Itâs full of fairy lights.
The motherboard has fairy lights. The memory sticks have fairy lights. The fans have fairy lights. The graphics card has fairy lights. Running under test conditions, with the side panels removed, it looks like a deranged christmas tree.
When I bought the components, I was under the illusion that âgamingâ meant âhigh performanceâ. It seems I was wrong. âGamingâ means âHas fairy lightsâ.
I believe I can turn this nonsense off in the BIOS, but so far I havenât discovered how.
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Pretty is as gaming does. 
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Better than a christmas tree. With the right software, you can probably change the whole look of the PC with different colours, different effects, all synchronised and prettier than a stripper in a meadow of flowers.
At least it powers up. Could be worse.
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Honestly, I think it looks dreadful. Itâs a serious piece of machinery - and it looks like a 1980s disco. Ick.
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I know. It takes some getting used to. I hated it at first but it grew on me. I opted for minimalist argb with just the motherboard, memory and water reservoir having it. Some people go all out and have it everywhere. It doesnât look too bad with a pulsing effect with just one colour or a gradient of two colours.
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I was looking for a pic and found this
So thatâs really a thing, but, why?
Anyway, your PC be like
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I laughed out loud at this!
I would ust prop it up somewhere for the next couple of months and put presents under it. Save the trouble of setting up a tree. 
:more giggles ensue: I love the way you phrase things.
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I turned mine off, but had to purchase some specialised black tape to âtone downâ the eye-searing violence of the the tiny blue light right on the front of the box (and unfortunately at my eye level) that is supposed to tell you (And the rest of the universe, apparently) that the computer is ON. >.>
It still haunts me from under the tape, but it has been subdued if not tamed.
(EDIT: Changed âonâ, which was supposed to be âoneâ to âlightâ.)
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Oh that was YOUR fault. I thought I was having a heart attack and the ambulance was coming for me!
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Talking about health, and I realise this is completely off topicâŚ
Does anyone else get so engrossed in their gaming that they delay going to the loo until theyâre completely about to burst? I swear I was cursed with the smallest bladder ever 
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My loo is very near my gaming room. I have a bladder of steel anyway. However, I have had those games where I could not save right that second (remember save points, like the ones you had to progress thru the story to reach before you could save)âŚthose were the days. 
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I started the software installation today. Having read some horror stories on the web, I expected trouble installing Windows 11 Pro, especially onto a bootable NVME. I neednât have worried - it went very smoothly.
There are a few quirks, compared to how we did things in the olden days. The system preparation tools like FDISK and FORMAT have gone, and are replaced with a suite of tools within Windows itself. This presents something of a conundrum, as you canât use any of your fixed disks until you have initialised and formatted them, but you canât initialise your fixed disks until you have installed Windows, and you canât install Windows until there is an initialised and formatted drive to install it onto. But it all works out.
It pains me to say it (Iâm no fan of Microsoft), but so far, Windows 11 seems to work quite well. At least it doesnât try to stop me from installing Firefox, or from setting Firefox as my default browser, the way Win 10 did.
Booting up is astonishingly fast. I havenât tried any games yet - Iâm still installing utility software and drivers, but things are looking positive. Hopefully I now have some degree of future-proofing.
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Guilty as charged.
Iâll give you run for your money⌠>.>
I often donât make it. 
Mostly because I get engrossed in whatever Iâm doing, and somehow the signal doesnât get through the glorious noise. I think Iâve stretched mine so much it has thinned out and now has probably sprung leaks.
How I envy you! lol
Oh my, yes! And they are still making those. Iâve been trying to play through Rhianna Pratchettâs story game âLost Words: Beyond the Page.â which even aside from the (for me) unfamilliar mechanics, doesnât seem to tell you when it has moved to the next proper section of the story, More than once I have thought I was finoshed with a part, only to come back the next day and find I have to start that part over again (Although it is possible that Iâm the problem, and the game IS telling me, but I canât see it anywhere). And the chapters (or whatever) seem very long, and the loo may as well be the other side of the universeâŚ
Wait! Donât say it! Aww⌠too late! >.>
Iâm glad it went relatively smoothly for you. Back on Windose (sic) 10 here I have only recently figured out how to locate the recycle bin. For ages, it just wasnât anywhere. then I got impatient (as I often do) and dug deep into the file system, and now its Icon resides on the start menu.
It has taken me years to realise that I can add menu items to the icons on the task bar. I use plain text files for my art process notes, and often have three or four I need to access daily. But you cannot open a new text file and upon saving have a way to add it to the list above the Notepad icon on the task bar. You have to go to the folder you saved it to and right click the text file you just saved (and I find that pretty tedious just finding it again), and drag it to the task bar, whereupon it will add itself to the Notepad iconâs menu list. And I must say that list saves me a ton of time. Saves me time because every time Win 10 upgrades, all but the original of my Notepad files are gone from the taskbar unless they are pinned to that list. And off I go searching out the text files I need once again. Nifty⌠âWhere do you want to go today?â
Iâm really happy to hear that! And I personally do appreciate you sharing your experience of Win 11 with us. Thank you. 
-felt
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How exactly did you climb out of this rabbit hole of Oozlum birds?
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I need to be careful about what I describe here. As I said earlier, Iâve read a lot of horror stories about this process going wrong, so unless your circumstances are identical to mine, I canât guarantee it will work.
Firstly, I had purchased Windows 11 Pro on a grey retail OEM system builderâs installation DVD. These are not intended for supply to the public - in fact, retail sale is expressly forbidden. They are intended for use by commercial companies who are licensed by Microsoft to install Windows on the computers they sell.
I had built the computer, and installed all drives - thatâs an NVME in the M2-1 slot, two seagate 6 terabyte hard discs, and two ASUS DVD R/W drives - these were in SATA ports 1 - 4.
When I started up the computer (BIOS, but no O/S installed) there was some confusion about how many hard disks I had. The BIOS could see the NVME, both DVDs, but only one of the Seagates. The motherboard manual didnât say anything about this - but I found an article on ASUSâ website in which they describe a very similar problem. ASUS said that if an NVME was installed in the M2-1 slot, then SATA channel 1 would be disabled, This is because M2-1 and SATA 1 share PCIE data lanes, and there isnât capacity for both. I moved the SATA devices to ports 2,3,4, and 5, and the BIOS then recognised all my drives, with no conflicts.
The motherboard is new, and has UEFI BIOS as standard. Older boards donât. Windows 11 requires UEFI. It also requires Trusted Platform Module (TPM) version 2. This is very confusing to the user.
TPM is fairly old tech, in the form of a separate circuit board that plugs into a suitable slot on your motherboard. Nowadays, itâs implemented on the processor, but itâs not called TPM. Intel call it TPP.
Quite why Microsoft are asking for TPM, when what they actually want is TPP, is beyond me.
The i9 11th gen processor Iâm using does have TPP v2, but it has to be specifically enabled in the BIOS.
OK. So far, so good. The BIOS can see all the drives, and we have UEFI and TPP enabled. The fixed discs and the NVME are not, however, initialised or formatted.
Back into the BIOS, and we call up boot sequence. We tell it to boot from DVD. Save the changes, put the Windows installation DVD in the drive, and shut down the system.
On startup, the system now boots from the DVD. Pretty much the first thing it wants you to do is activate Windows with the 25 digit product key that came with the DVD. Once itâs happy with that, a tools dialogue box comes up. You need to be careful here. It asks you which drive you want to boot from. It identifies the drives by some crazy serial numbers that meant nothing to me, and lists them as drive 1, drive 2, and drive 3.
It does, however, tell you the capacity of the drives. Now the Seagates are 6 terabyte each, and the NVME is 4 terabyte. It was only by checking the drive capacities I was able to tell that drive 1 was a Seagate, and so was drive 2. The NVME was actually drive 3.
So I told it I wanted to boot from drive 3 (the NVME). I clicked on OK, and another dialogue box came up. This had various options for formatting and partitioning the NVME - none of which looked suitable. But over on the right-hand side of the dialogue was a little tick box that said ânewâ.
There was no explanation or guidance. So I made a leap of faith, selected drive 3, clicked the ânewâ box, and clicked NEXT.
It turned out to be the right thing to do. It initialised the NVME, formatted it, and created boot partitions. It did not, however, initialise or format the Seagates. The dialogue box then asked me if I wanted to install the system files? I said yes, and it did.
Then it wanted internet access, which I gave it, and it automatically updated to the latest version of Windows 11.
Once Windows 11 was installed and running, I had to manually initialise and format the Seagates. But that was fairly easy, because I had Windows running on the computer.
Job done. A certain amount of luck involved.
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Interesting. Itâs such a shame motherboard manufacturers, microsoft, etc canât appreciate just how little some people understand about PCs and make the BIOSs, manuals etc more user friendly.
I think youâre the first person Iâve spoken to who has actually installed Windows 11. Youâre an explorer! Let us know how it goes - I still havenât decided whether or not to upgrade.
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One of the reasons I have stickers all over my computer. Inside and out. Also for my headphone jack because I canât remember which side is mic and which is headphonesâŚso, I may not have fairy lights in my pc, but I do have colorful stickers. 
Canât wait to see some NMS screens from your new rig.
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I am more and more of the opinion that thatâs the way Microsoft wants it. In the 1980s, Microsoft actually built their business on the back of home constructors and modifiers. It was the versatility of the PCâs open architecture, the fact that anybody could make expansion boards for the PC, anybody could build or upgrade one, that gave Microsoft their dominant position in the market.
But now they are dominant, they want to close everything off, and control it all themselves. They donât want people like you and me fooling around with their product.
I said earlier in this thread that thereâs no information available from Microsoft on how to set up a new PC with Windows 11, and itâs true. They tell us nothing. They donât want us building our own - they want us to buy systems from Microsoft licensed manufacturers. This is also true of the software. You can buy official Windows 11 upgrades, but the installation software for a new build is only available through subterfuge. They donât want us to have it.
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Absolutely. Itâs not just Microsoft though - itâs the whole industry.
Manuals are deliberately vague. God help you if you have a faulty motherboard - the debug codes are impossible to understand. They may as well not be there. And good luck getting a response from any manufacturer if your product is faulty. If you have to RMA it, expect to pay exorbitant fees. Asus wanted ÂŁ70 just for the shipping costs on my faulty motherboard. Weâre all too aware of the exorbitant costs of GPUs right now and the manufacturers arenât in a rush for the problem to be resolved - theyâre making money hand over fist. CPUs that have been capped are another example - there is no excuse for my i9-10980XE to not be able to run the latest ram speeds.
Then thereâs the gaming industry (arguably the fuel that drives the hardware industry) - I canât count the number of games Iâve played that never should have been released with their multiple bugs that never get fixed. The latest fiasco being âNew Worldâ which is actually making GPUs explode. Now weâre getting games that you simply canât play if your hardware isnât powerful enough - playing on lower settings simply isnât an option. I just played Assassinâs creed Valhalla, Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey and Iâm currently playing Death Stranding. All have minimal hardware requirements that hit your wallet drastically.
They all want your money. They want it now. They want as much of it as they can possibly get from you. I canât think of any other industry that is as comparable. If you bought a car with the inherent bugs that Windows had it would be recalled en-masse. Itâs no different to the principle of affordable energy - despite the leaps in sustainable energy, weâre still paying exorbitant costs to fuel our homes and transport.
But weâre hooked. Technology progresses and we canât wait for that next leap, that faster CPU, GPU or storage device (those leaps are staged over time to get the most profit possible). The latest game that has almost realistic graphics. And of course the fairy lights. Weâre probably addicted just as strongly as drug addicts.
Whatever happened to the days when you could buy a bunch of CDs from that guy you knew with the latest games and movies, eh? The bastards! 
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