What a rough month or so, technically, it has been.
First, there was the wholesale crash of the podcast site that I am still trying to recover from.
Then, the PC starts acting up. It started with a brown out or 2 and my 10 year old 19″ CRT. For those of you that don’t understand that, it was a HUGE monitor that weighed in at about 60lbs. Work horse of a unit I’ll have you know with great image quality. But, like I said, it started getting a bit dodgy.
So I replace it with a brand new 20″ LCD widescreen from Viewsonic (model: VA2012wb, $299 @ Costco). I can say I’m diggin’ it. bright, great color, plenty fast for my needs (8ms response time). I even upgraded my video card, but you’ll have to continue reading after the jump 
I was running a nVidia GeForce 5200 with 128MB of RAM. Great card, but nothing like the double cooled monsters the kids are using for games. The problem was that it didn’t have DVI output, which the new display supported. So I went ahead and upgraded to the 6200. Same memory, but with a VGA (regular monitor) and a DVI output. I could run two monitors at the same too if I wanted to, but that another thing all together.
After that was done, and we had a few more brownouts, things started acting weird. I thought it was the video card, which is really why I upgraded. Installed the new one and nothing happened. Weird. So I unplugged all of the peripherals from the pc and hit the switch. Came right on. So, I started plugging in peripherals and cables, 1 at a time, and checking for boot.
Everything except some USB stuff was connected and it booted right up. So I go to plug in the iPod and poof my pc not only shut down, but it also would not reboot. Great, the brownouts must have shorted out the USB on my motherboard. Not wanting to replace the board, I opt for a USB card instead.
Pick that up at my local CompUSA and install it in a port I was using for a firewire card. But it wouldn’t install. I removed it and put it back, still nothing. Odd. I removed the modem (yes, a real live modem) and put it into that slot and poof, it installed. I even have all of my USB devices plugged in and it’s still working great. So, I not only have bad USB, but a bad PCI slot. Great. A new motherboard will be researched and replaced soon.
It’s a good thing I know what I’m doing. Otherwise I’m sure it would have cost many hundreds of dollars for troubleshooting and installation and god knows what.
Ugh.
Did I mention it’s been hot?
3 Responses to “Technical difficulty”
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July 26th, 2006 at 12:39 pm
Dude did you try these guys?
July 26th, 2006 at 1:55 pm
Holy crap!!! jSchwa made a funny
July 27th, 2006 at 12:33 pm
That is so wrong…