I Hate Computers

[The PIT]

Definatley having a bad weekend. One thing going wrong after another.
The XP machine decides it doesn't like my G400 so I think well I was going to put my G550 in that and put a better heatsink in.
That parts the easy bit. Put it all back together and the hard drives are grumbling. I reseat the power cables and it boots up but the network card isn't working. Take all apart again the card needed reseating. Put it back together again and the hard drives grumble again. Take it all to bits reseat the cables again power it up and it works. Put the case on put the computer back on the shelf and the hard drives fail again. Take it too bits again pull the power of the IBM drive (No.1 suspect) and the machine boots fine. Put in another power cable restart everything is fine put the case back together back on the shelf and the winxp won't start and the IBM is rattling again. Take it all to bits check the cabling it's fine put in the Drive fitness test floppy and the floppy disk is knackered. Create a new floppy on my other pc and try again. Yes the drive has two bad sectors. Do you want to fix it. Yes. Are you really sure. Yes I'm bloody am. Fixes it reboot windows works put the case back on and the basterd takes a bite out of me. Put it back on the shelf and it now bloody works.
Arrrgh an afternoon wasted and yesterday my car was acting up and today it's fine.

[Tempest]

My Genuine Abit Quality™ KA7-100 mainboard died yesterday night
My system was running Genome@Home for MURC and in the morning the computer was frozen. I rebooted and managed a couple of times into Windows, then not even into BIOS.
First I thought that my power supply was dying, but when I opened the case, I saw that of the 16 condensators near the CPU 11 (!) were swollen and had dark stuff leaking out of them.
Of course, the 1 year guarantee ended 4 months ago

Edit: Oh yeah and it's a Slot A board so I'm seriously considering ditching the CPU as well. But if I want to move to DDR memory then I will also have to get rid of my 1 gigabyte of SDRAM...

[Dr Mordrid]

Key thought for that upgrade: avoid an ABIT next time

Dr. Mordrid

[Greebe]

Tempest... if you're able to solder and feel upto it just replace the capacitors

[Guru]

One of my Abits died as well last week (only 1 left )! I have now have 6 ABIT with blown caps in my closet at home!

[KeiFront]

Take it all to bits check the cabling it's fine put in the Drive fitness test floppy and the floppy disk is knackered. Create a new floppy on my other pc and try again.

Floppy's are so reliable

[Technoid]

You can break a floppy just by giving it a mean look

[Wombat]

Floppies aren't <I>that</I> unreliable. Quality floppies work much better than generic crap or Imation disks.

[KeiFront]

But they always break when you really need them

[Wombat]

I wish they'd set it up so we could do these flashes from bootable CDs. CD-RW's would be great for this.

[Slougi]

Originally posted by Wombat
I wish they'd set it up so we could do these flashes from bootable CDs. CD-RW's would be great for this.

I don't see why u couldn't do that, just make a bootable cd with the necessary stuff on it.

[Wombat]

because these boot floppies usually come as a monolithic image, made specifically for a floppy. Also, they often back up the old bios onto the floppy. Not quite as easy to do to a CD-R, but I'm not sure it's impossible either, especially if you're not limited to 1.44MB.

[Bohrn]

yea, I've had wasted weekends like that The Pit. It sucks

I spent almost 2 hrs getting my printer online this sat nite! Wohoo what fun! Stupid thing worked a few hrs ago, and then it quit with a dll error. Uninstalled, re-boot, reinstall, "file not found, skip, browse etc, " No-go, uninstall, download new drivers, same thing, uninstall, clean registry, clean .inf's, download older drivers, reboot, install new older drivers, reboot, and it works. Oh, and checking cabling, ports, printer etc inbetween each step. Silly machine...

and yea, my car's cigarette lighter unscrewed itself from itself and fell in the dash. I have to take that apart now...

Fun and/or games

[The PIT]

Well troubles continue. Today I was playing a DVD on the other computer and one of the sound channels was noisy. Mmm Via chipset and noisy soundblaster never had any problems until now with this motherboard. But you never know. Luckily it was the sound cable that had gone to heaven. Opening the case also reminded me of the crap rounded cables I got from scan uk. They are are damn loose fit and of course I had to reseat them again. I'll replace these with some better ones sometime.
Now do I feel like re-installing win2k so I can get the later ATI drivers to work or will I wait to XP sp1 is out and then upgrade.

[The PIT]

Guess what this morning crappy XP lost the G550. So the that started a long struggle with the pc. I decided to move the 3com network card to another slot which then caused Nortons Firewall to chop off the home network. I also noticed several ghost entries for the 3com network card that I couldn't uninstall. The device maybe needed for windoze to bootup. What bollocks. Anyway it's backup again if it falls over Windoze XP shall be replaced with the reliable win2000.