pc issues

[transmothra]

So i just did a fresh, clean install of XP (MCE) and my pc still won't boot half the time. It powers up, but doesn't boot. It usually takes 2-4 tries. It won't restart, either, it just hangs, every time, after XP is down and it's still powered on. The screen is janky and just about anything makes it go all crazy, even after i uninstalled and reinstalled the driver.

I thought for a bit about building my own PC, scavenging what i can from this one, but too much is integrated into my mobo and i really don't know what, exactly, i can scavenge, since i don't know which bits are fried. Also, i can find a good mobo for cheap, but i have found that i have pretty demanding specs - when you're thinking about committing to a project like that, you really think long and hard about future-proofing as much as you can afford to. If i'm going to build my own rig, i want it to be capable of swapping out for bigger, better, badder parts and whatnot.

So i'm going to wait a little while and use this thing as much as it will allow me to, and then take it into the shop and plunk down as much as they want to just fix it.

I've found that, having bitten off far more than i could ever conceivably hope to chew in the course of a lifetime on several occasions, i honestly don't miss working on my computer all that much. I don't miss the internets very much. It's kind of nice to have nothing to do. Although, i do have a brand new batch of terrible/mediocre/pretty decent CDs to review, so that's got to get done. Other than that, though... I think it will be a nice change of pace to be dormant in cyberspace for a little while longer.

Still... if anyone has any tips or insights they'd like to impart, please do feel free....

Comments

[tyrsalvia.livejournal.com]

Moffra, I want to personally invite you to come out to the Robert Anton Wilson Memorial Weekend (Feb 16-19). You'd be more than welcome to stay with me for the PantheaCon memorials and the official Meme-Orial. A bunch of awesome people will be here for that, you should be one of them.

[transmothra.livejournal.com]

Oh, crap! There's no way i could possibly afford to go anywhere. I'm working 50 hours just to stay afloat+ these days :( That sure sounds incredible, though. Thank you. Someday, somehow, i swear i'll be able to come out, and will!

[luminosity.livejournal.com]

taking a break from the net can be a wonderful thing I have been on so long I think I have a direct connection and maybe we do the authors of the web downloaded to new minds every day.
that and although I am certain you are not looking for any run of the mill rig the craiglist and new egg has some of the best deals around.

[transmothra.livejournal.com]

i love newegg! i got a 2Gb SD card there for $33 once! they're so fast, too!

[mjb.livejournal.com]

Fresh install of XP and still having trouble with the boot? And wonky monitor action too? Hardware problems. Bad video card or bad power supply. I'd replace both...

I just did that on my 7 year old PC because I bought a new LCD monitor that wasn't compatible with a year 2000 Matrox card. So I bought a new $80 nVidia card from CompUSA. Then I find out that the new video cards these days (AGP versions of which are getting harder to find) require a separate power supply hookup. So I had to go back and buy a new 400W supply for about $40. This is just to keep my old 1.0 GHz P3 Win2K desktop running... sigh. And due to BIOS limitations I can only access 137 GB of a new 150 GB hard drive, even with a new controller, and I can't boot from that drive. Argh. Replacing components piecemeal saves some money, but it ends up being not that much more to do the mobo and RAM too, once all is said and done.

The kicker is that the monitor isn't as good as I thought it'd be. Or rather, it's too good. It's too bright and it makes fonts look too jaggy -- Win2K doesn't have ClearType, so I have to rely on regular font smoothing, which is turned off, via metadata in the TrueType font files, at all the common point sizes, under the theory that crisp-and-jaggy is better than fuzzy-and-antialiased. It's the rendering engine that decides whether to honor that setting, and none of them let you configure it. Adobe products don't honor it, which is why PDFs don't get jaggy. I'm considering using a font editor to modify my system fonts so the metadata says to leave smoothing on at all point sizes... but that seems like a lot of trouble.

Anyways... nice to see you back.

[transmothra.livejournal.com]

i'm thinking it's probably the PSU. It's an eMachine, which by extension means it's a Gateway, so it's got some shoddy components. But the video card is nVidia 6100, so i doubt it's that. I'm going to swap out my old PSU some day soon and see if it runs any better.

sounds like you could use a new mobo! try newegg.com, they have some sweeeeeeeet deals!