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Comments on Tuesday 18 November 2003:
There follows geekly tales of woe. They are probably not interesting. Move along.

The other day, I exploded my motherboard. The machine was still doing its arbitrary rebooting thing mentioned a while back, and I had discovered it to not, in fact, be that it was overheating (by purchasing a lot of extra fans and stuff - the CPU was 15 degrees away from its shutoff temperature and the machine rebooted anyway). I went into the BIOS to turn off the CPU temperature shutoff feature entirely, in case there was something wrong with the measuring, and while I was there I foolishly poked at some of the sillier options to do with the CPU and the front-side-bus speed. When I rebooted the machine... er, I didn't reboot the machine. I made its power-light come on, and that was about it.

So, like any good geek, I switched it off quickly before it had time to melt anything, and went to reset the CMOS. That motherboard was the cheaper version of its kind; they had apparently saved some of the cost by omitting two pins, so I couldn't reset the CMOS. I took the CMOS battery out, then, left it for a while, put it back in, but still no bootage would occur. Perhaps I had fried the CPU.

Conclusion - buy a new motherboard. Which means also buying a new CPU and new memory since everything's all incompatible with parts from two years ago. The new parts arrived today. I spent the requisite hour or two getting the parts fitted together, slicing my limbs off on the jagged edges, trapping cables between bits of case so that they bend pins on the motherboard and accidentally dropping a ringpull into the circuitry, eventually resolving in a functioning happy motherboard. But not a functioning happy computer system, because, it seems, Windows 2000 doesn't like it if you make a major change of motherboard. Doesn't like it at all. Doesn't like it in a "you can't boot, you can't boot in safe-mode, and a repair-install won't help you either" sort of way. So, a drive-formatting reinstall, an all-the-software-I-use reinstall, and, at last, I have a working usable machine once more. Eight hours and lots of money later. On the up-side, it seems to be fixed - no more random rebooting. And the external hard-drive, which kept resetting randomly when connected via firewire, doesn't do so when connected via USB2 (which the other motherboard didn't do). So a worthwhile upgrade, at least.

The motherboard, which seems like a nice piece of kit, is an ABIT AI7. The memory is a gigabyte of PC-3200 Corsair, in two half-gigabyte sticks. The CPU is a 2.4GHz Intel Celery. Nik tells me I should have got a better processor and the goodness of the memory is a waste, but the shop with good prices and fast shipping didn't have any worse memory (without going lots worse), and the Smelleron is much cheaper than a better one. And the setup is still about 60% faster than my old system. [12:00]

sum nemo
Ouch! Damn, that sucks. I've never done that one, although I set up a file sharing thing for the publication I work on, and one day when the power went off, our cheap liitle Imac that was the server for all our files died. Reboot- oh yeah, "hold down shift key to turn off extenstion" except that didn't work. We had to reinstall bascially the entire OS...fortunatly all but two of our files were backed up. But still, on the day of our deadline, that realy blew.

Soli
I have a secret trick to fix all computer-related woes.

Ready?

Buy a Mac.

There, that wasn't so bad, was it?

RavenBlack
Mm, then I wouldn't be able to use it at all, so it wouldn't matter if it broke. Perfect.

RavenBlack
...and if its motherboard short-circuited I wouldn't have to worry about replacing parts, because you can't, so I'd just have a buy a whole new one for about ten times as much as I'd have paid to repair a PC. Woo!

RavenBlack
Oh yes, and according to sum nemo (didn't you read before you posted?) if I had a mac then I'd only have to worry about having to reinstall the OS *when there's a power cut*. Brilliant.

sum nemo
'ey, that's only happened ONCE! Once, I tell you! Anywho, it was one of those old Imacs, a worthless machine. I've never known anyone who had a mac who managed to blow thier motherboard. Only people with PCs.

RavenBlack
Mm, that would be because when people with a Mac blow their motherboard, they don't "blow their motherboard", they "break their computer".

C. Copperpot
If it's one of the current Imacs, They can "break their lamp".

Digi
I had a Power Mac who's motherboard was blown up. It resulted in a lack of computer. A whole new computer was bought, and all the working, salvageable parts from the blown one (RAM, hard drive) were stolen by the people who’s job it was to declare the blown one 'blown'. Of course, I didn't notice that the stolen things had been stolen until about a year later, when I opened the blown one's case. With a chisel. Because a designer thought it was cute to build the whole fucking thing, monitor and all, into the same lump of plastic. But that's okay, because the plastic wasn't that "usual boring grey". It was an exciting, and dynamic cream-beige. The new one ground to a halt about 4 months later.

YES! I'll buy one again tomorrow, just as soon as I've sold a lung. Far better than buying an entire system brand new for £400, and getting all the software free (because anyone can for Windows). You see if I take the IBM option I'll be forced to dismount from this massive bunch of pony that I'm ill equipped to ride, and deal with the fact that I'm not special - that I don't have a piece of plastic and crap that gives me moral superiority over the unwashed masses - that the only reason I'm able to pollute this world with my redundant, elitist rat-shite is that I was born before the NHS made it their policy to fit all abortion buckets with anti-crawl sides.

***

‘Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition’ is pretty nice. It has all the lovely things that XP had, minus nearly all the crap, plus some fairly decent customisability that lets you get rid of what little XPish crap there is, plus loads of things you’ll never use, but can get rid of (servers for things, and things). So all together it’s a thumbs up, and warezable.
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