Frustrations, Technically Speaking
So I forgot to mention an adventure I’ve been on since last Friday. My PC motherboard died, it just freaking died. I wasn’t overclocking, the thing wasn’t overheating, I didn’t drop it, no power surges (it’s on a UPS backup + a good surge protector). Using PC, it crashes, won’t boot up again.
Well, I didn’t fry my motherboard, it just died on me. I mean, I’ve had it running 24/7 for about 3 years and 5 months, give or take, so I guess it had to happen sometime, but still kind of soon I think. My last motherboard is still running 24/7 at home.
OK, here goes:
I get on Friday night, then BAM, computer freezes, weird. I press the reset button (ctrl+alt+del wouldn’t work), weird, motherboard boot up screen won’t show up. I let the computer sit for a while, unplug it to let the motherboard fully reset, back on…nothing. Damn, this is an actual problem. So I get to diagnosing…
Open up the case, look around, everything is perfect, lights are on, fans are working, no strange smells…darn, what now? Stuff isn’t overheating either. So I unplug everything and take out every card too. So right now it’s the ram, motherboard, and video card and still the exact same problem. Monitor works, tried it from the laptop. I get pissed off and watch a movie (The Hot Chick…wasn’t worth it for the couple funny moments in the movie).
So later I get back to diagnosing. Swapped around ram (I had 4 sticks currently being used), alternating, etc etc. No luck. So it isn’t the power supply, isn’t the ram, either motherboard or video card or cpu. I got an extra cpu at home that I can swap, my old 1.8GHz. So the next morning I drive home (2 hours each way), get the cpu and some extra junk (thermal paste, etc). I get back to my apartment and realize I forgot the old GeForce2 video card, bah.
I swap in the cpu, no luck, same problem. Bastard PC, so video card or motherboard. No place around here has a motherboard that supports socket 478 + rdram (I didn’t bother checking the local computer places) so I drive to Circuit City, buy a Geforce 6800 AGP, bring it back, toss it in the PC….no go. Sonuva! I go back to Circuit City and return the card.
So gotta replace the motherboard….which was a no go too, no company makes or carries a motherboard that uses RDRAM + Socket 478 + 400MHz bus speed. I didn’t really want to shell out a lot of cash to get a new cpu too (or video card if I went PCI-e), so I bought a new motherboard that uses DDR RAM and supports 400/533/800 bus, which is good, upgradability. Bought a gig of ram too. Got the junk in 2 nights, hooked it up, took a while, stupid bad online lian-li case documentation.
So XP wouldn’t boot up, makes sense I guess, since the mobo is a huge replacement, but still, work bastard! So did an XP repair installation and finished up some junk around 1am. I’m going to hold up on doing a clean install, I ordered tons of parts to make my own PC, hopefully they will all arrive by this weekend (most of them are here). Then backup old -> new, format old, use new. Old (which isn’t really “old”, still very fast) goes to my mom, their PC is very slow now. And you know it’s slow when my mom says “it’s running slow, Firefox takes a long time to load up”. Yes, Firefox, gotta love it when non-techies are using it.
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