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June 6, 2006
I am still not the smartest man you will ever meet
(This is a continuation of an entry that has yesterday's date ... both entries were thrown together one after the other. The first was finished as I started a hot cup of protein drink ... the second, this one, was started as I finished the hot cup of protein drink. You probably should read yesterday's entry first)
I arrived at work around 6:04 a.m. Full of spunk. A song in my heart. A spring in my step. I'd round this all out with a hard drive in my hand and a screwdriver in my pocket and then head to the AP Clerk's computer.
My plan was to replace her older, slower hard drive with something newer that had a faster transfer rate. Setup would take about 10 minutes and then I'd be able to address the CEO's ODBC problem while files transfered from the old drive to the new drive.
I removed the case, disconnected the CD-ROM drive and plugged the new drive into that IDE connector. I booted and received a CD Drive not found error. No shit! I'd disconnected it. I'd done this a thousand times before and never run into this error message. Maybe I'd missed something. I rebooted and got the same message. The Press F1 to Continue was useless as pressing F1 did nothing aside from burn .00001 calories.
I eventually reinstalled the CD-ROM drive and set the new hard drive as a slave on the primary controller.
I rebooted and got to the message advising me that system settings had changed did I want to (S)ave, or (I)gnore them. This message is provided by our antivirus package -- since I knew why the settings had changed I opted to save them. I pressed S.
There was no keyboard response.
Ah yea. This happens more than you would think. And yet, not all the time despite the fact that 90% of the motherboards in the building are the same. At some point during the boot process the keyboard becomes disabled. I'll have keyboard capability at the point I need to hit DEL to enter the BIOS and then when Windows is running. At the point I need to answer the system settings query, however, the keyboard is nonresponsive.
This can be fixed by tweaking the BIOS. In the past I've tried shutting things off one or two at a time only to eventually give up and just disable a whole boatload of BIOS crap. Today I thought I'd be a little more scientific and make notes of my progress so in the future I could go to exactly what I needed. For more than an hour I tweaked the BIOS and rebooted. Nothing worked.
Finally I thought maybe I had a hardware problem of some kind and decided to swap out video cards. I replaced the PCI card with an AGP card and hit the power button. The sound the PC emitted suggested that something bad had happened. The smell that presented itself a fraction of a second later backed this up to a degree. The lack of any type of lights flashing or fans spinning was the icing on the cake.
I started unplugging things -- it was time to head back to my office with this box. And this is when I noticed something ... the part of the process that points to my profound stupidity ... as I unplugged the keyboard I noticed the USB end.
The non-responsive-keyboard problem had never been corrected when the keyboard in question is a USB keyboard. I knew this. I also knew this PC had a PS2 connection as it also had an extension due to the distance between the CPU and keyboard. I'd set it up a good long while ago.
Unfortunately, about a month ago I'd replaced that keyboard with a USB keyboard. It would seem my long-term memory has it all over my short-term memory.
The item that had fried was the power supply. It may have been coincidence that it cooked after I plugged the AGP card in. During a couple of the reboots I'd noticed the fans spinning a couple of revolutions only to stop. Each time as I'd formed the do I have a short somewhere question in my mind the PC would crank up. It seemed odd, but not odd enough.
I guess it was odd-aplenty.
Everything is working now. All is well.
Posted by delmer at June 6, 2006 10:47 AM
Comments
At least your computer problem didn't become a "Super sized" one.
Posted by: The Phoenix at June 6, 2006 9:41 PM