Termyn8or
Posts: 18681
Joined: 11/12/2005
Status: offline
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PC one fried out. I'll make the synopsis as short as possible. It seemed to have HD crashes. I'm used to the OS crashing and burning, virus or whatever. In fact I've taken to cloning drives for backup. Burn, fuckit, a touch of Ghost or a HD utility will fix that. But this happened too much. Three times in about as many days. It comes up with hal.dll missing or corrupted and the next step from there is NTLDR missing. Mainly of course, these problems happened during a reboot, once during instalation of the mobo drivers.
It didn't want to POST, Removing the power made it POST again. I changed the HD, loaded it and all was well for a time. Later, it started wanting to reboot itself. Now I already had run Linux off the CD and it found the new (not) HD I put in which it wouldn't boot from, but it did not find the original HD the PC had in the beginning (SATA), however this was MEPIS so it might not be hep to SATA.
At least back then it would POST and I could make it boot off the CD, now all it does is run the fans. I have removed all peripherals and the RAM, reinstalled the RAM selectively (both sticks usually don't go bad at the same time) and still no POST with nothing else connected. I will try another PS in it, but how would you like to know the source ?
My sinister calls. After a power outage her PC went down, no POST, but her's has no pwer light on, no fans running our anything. Now I know how an SMPS works so basically I know in such a case it was running in standby for a long time and the filters started to fail, this upsets the regulation loop and it destroys itself on power up. This is without a power surge. The PS in that was changed a bit over a year ago, but so what. So I dropped a PS in it and no change.
Well I'll try her old PS in mine, we'll see. But I refuse to be optimistic about this. What you have to understand is that I intend to continue to run XP. I finally know my way around the fucking thing. Vista is completely useless to me, and I don't even want to think about 7.
Each of these PCs has been through the procedure and it looks like motherboards. If I have to buy motherboards and run XP, I better get get the gettin's good. Therefore, I should find identical motherboards. I need two right off the bat. I've seen some cheap mobos out there, processor loaded and everything. If I buy two, why not four ? That way when one fails I can just swap it out and not have to reload anything.
I got plenty of storage drives, but dammit, the drivers are always different, and who knows. Eventually a minimum system requirement will beVista, and really, at that point I am done. Maybe some don't understand. The motherfucker works. It has SP2 on it. Some guy on the net thought I was trying to do something ilegal because I refused to get SP3 (no coments at this time please). What a fucking crock. The motherfucker works now. When you get SP3 if it doesn't work there is an option to remove it. Why ? Because it might fuck something up. Now let's review - THE MOTHER FUCKER WORKS NOW. Why should I go through all that bullshit ? Every PC I ever build is going to run off a cloned drive. I'll load a cheapo 4.3 gig for the OS originally, get all the drivers in and the DESIRED updates for that PC. Then the drive gets cloned to what will now be the boot drive. There will always be a second drive for data. Period. I am not falling into this upgrade game anymore.
Got any ideas for a good mobo that is reasonably priced and reliable ? Even if it ain't reliable I'll get extras. Just pop the fuckers in when need be. We got HDs, DVD ROMs, RAMs, RIMs, ROMs and whatever. We got decent PSes, nice cases.
And anyone who tells me to get virus protection forget it. I will reclone the OS at will. I simply don't need it. Thing is now, my way is helpful when hardware actually does fail. Got a WD that started clinking ? Did I build it ? Cool, pick up a HD and call me. You are fully backed up. What's more I'll even put the shortcuts to any seconday drives in before the clone. All the good software will be installed (the kind you have to install). Everything. Boom it's done. Old drive, new drive, doesn't matter anymore, as long as you have that backup.
Takes about two hours for me load a PC, but I have to be there, stick the other disk in, tell is yes or no here and there. Once the cloning starts I can just go to sleep.
So with the mobos, same thing. BOOM, done in fifteen minutes.
Whaddya think of that plan ? Remember nothing is saved on the boot drive. Cool thing about that is it can be a little forty gig. In fact that's what I am booted off of right now. Thing runs fine. There are no files of mine on the forty. That's what the other 700 GB is for. Drive E, F whatever, who cares ? In fact that's another topic related. How the hell do these drive letters come about. I booted off SATA at one time and it's C. I throw in an IDE drive all the sudden that drive is I. Then I get this old drive I forgot about that has 2000 Pro on it. That'e C, so on the last round PCone booted off D on that drive because it had been unpartitioned space. So what it was small, there's plenty of space on the network.
But this jockeying of letters around almost made my head spin. Sometime the CD comes before the card readers, sometimes not. I had the same shit a while back using a bunch of SCSI drives. You set them in order and the drive letters go the way you say, but where do they start ? Do IDE drives come first or not ?
When you don't understand why I resist change in something like a PC, you simply don't. Let me put it this way, you are a car mechanic. You have YOUR tools. You know them, you use them. Someone comes in and wants to trade you a dandy new wrench for your old rust crusty greasy sleazy nasty piece of shit you use every day. So you trade and he is off with your working wrench and the wrench you now have does not do what you want it to do, and then it breaks. You call the guy and there is no answer. Only another number you can call to pay to buy an even newer wrench that supposedly solves all problems of past wrenches. Even if you order it, lay there under a car with a fucking transmission on you chest while they "handle" it and "ship" it from fucking Butte, Montana.
I now pass the soapbox.
T^T
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I used to like to fix things. (computers etc.) - 
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