I recently (a week ago) had my desktop decide to die in two different ways. It was giving me grief for a month before that, refusing to start for the first
few (1-12) attempts, but a bit of poking would get it to fire up, and it ran well enough when it was up.
A few days before it died, it began failing to POST, giving me a speaker error code. The code said that no video card was detected... which I knew was bogus,
as my GTX 280 worked just fine when the PC started. I started leaving it on Standby overnight, to minimize the number of times I'd have to start it.
The day before it died, I got hit hard with viruses. I'm still not sure what got me, but the computer did some awful strange things. At one point, I
rattled off a phrase into Google, and it searched backwards. Yeah. So, I moved all essential files off my C
partition (I have 4 other partitions, including 3 other drives), nuked it, and reinstalled XP. As I was bringing it up from a restart (reinstalling drivers),
it decided to die, and none of my poking/prodding was bringing it back up.
It's now working, one week, a new motherboard, and 1.5 days of effort later. The funny part is that, as I was buttoning up the case, I realized that the
reason it wasn't starting wasn't because of the mobo's PCI-E port dying (as I thought), but because the graphics card wasn't properly seated in
the mobo- a quirk in my case made it possible to either seat it properly, or secure it properly. With some... unorthodox efforts (longer screws, different
holes, and big washers), I did both this time. Still, I bought a replacement part I didn't actually need.
Over the last 8 hours, I have almost all my programs reinstalled and running properly. I've expanded my anti-virus/anti-spyware setup (which was screwed
up by WSU's mandatory Symantec install before the reformat), and upgraded everything that had a new release since 2007, when I last reinstalled Windows.
All that's left is to fix my 40-50 game shortcuts that, because the new XP install rearranged my drive letters, don't point to the right places. After
that, I have three more programs to install, about 270GB of personal files (including >40k music files) to organize and comb for redundancies, and several
thousand browser bookmarks to do the same to.
My baby's back up and running, though, and that makes it all worth it.
My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.
I've been writing a bit.
few (1-12) attempts, but a bit of poking would get it to fire up, and it ran well enough when it was up.
A few days before it died, it began failing to POST, giving me a speaker error code. The code said that no video card was detected... which I knew was bogus,
as my GTX 280 worked just fine when the PC started. I started leaving it on Standby overnight, to minimize the number of times I'd have to start it.
The day before it died, I got hit hard with viruses. I'm still not sure what got me, but the computer did some awful strange things. At one point, I
rattled off a phrase into Google, and it searched backwards. Yeah. So, I moved all essential files off my C
partition (I have 4 other partitions, including 3 other drives), nuked it, and reinstalled XP. As I was bringing it up from a restart (reinstalling drivers),
it decided to die, and none of my poking/prodding was bringing it back up.
It's now working, one week, a new motherboard, and 1.5 days of effort later. The funny part is that, as I was buttoning up the case, I realized that the
reason it wasn't starting wasn't because of the mobo's PCI-E port dying (as I thought), but because the graphics card wasn't properly seated in
the mobo- a quirk in my case made it possible to either seat it properly, or secure it properly. With some... unorthodox efforts (longer screws, different
holes, and big washers), I did both this time. Still, I bought a replacement part I didn't actually need.
Over the last 8 hours, I have almost all my programs reinstalled and running properly. I've expanded my anti-virus/anti-spyware setup (which was screwed
up by WSU's mandatory Symantec install before the reformat), and upgraded everything that had a new release since 2007, when I last reinstalled Windows.
All that's left is to fix my 40-50 game shortcuts that, because the new XP install rearranged my drive letters, don't point to the right places. After
that, I have three more programs to install, about 270GB of personal files (including >40k music files) to organize and comb for redundancies, and several
thousand browser bookmarks to do the same to.
My baby's back up and running, though, and that makes it all worth it.
My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.
I've been writing a bit.