Saturday, March 25, 2006
Murphy’s Out In Force
I’m at work with my nephew today, with overlapping major projects, plus his computer in which the power supply died and took out the motherboard.
Nothing is going right. Nothing has gone right since I got up, really.
I had spare parts that would match the dead motherboard and, if needed, AMD CPU. They were in a machine we built, that died, that we rebuilt, that kind of worked but ran too hot in the particular case, that was put aside for future reference and not touched since months ago.
Turns out it was in the room near the inventory that got stolen last fall, and I never even realized it was missing. Not a great loss, but it really made our day not to have the parts. Well, it means the value of what was stolen just doubled or so, but still, it was a troubled set of parts pretending to think about being a working computer.
That’s going to mean buying a motherboard and, in a fit of sensible “may as well because we’re not sure the old one is good and it’s reasonable to upgrade,” a CPU too. And further delay having the computer working again.
Well, then we started setting up a new computer for the big client’s bookkeeper, the idea being since we’re upgrading accounting software anyway, fell swoop it. Got XP all configured and on the network and the internet, activated Windows, started installing software and the screen went black.
Turned out the video is just fine. It simply stops producing any when the boot process turns itself over to the hard drive, which is SATA, and which appears to be detected just fine. By this time we’re already running even later than we were initially.
Even as I am typing this, the second of the new machines we are trying keeps having trouble reading what’s on install CDs. But hey, the video still works.
Staying in bed: It’s a Good Thing. Some days.