Computer Issues
My desktop has reached the two year old mark now. Though, it's been non-operational for the last month. A while back my DVD burner died, but it wasn't the end of the world. I was backing up a lot of files to it at the time and my have over-worked it. It was, after all, the generic burner Dell gives out. At some point, I ended up subscribing to Netflix and along with that started to make copies of all the decent movies I rented. This was fine at first, I have 1.3TB of space on that machine. Though it may seem like a lot of space, once you account for the porn and all those DVD ISO's, it goes away quick. So, with some money I got for my birthday, I decided to by a new burner.
Now, I hate to turn off or reboot my computer. So, the burner sat in a box for a week or so. Within that time, I came home from work one night to find my computer off. And it wouldn't turn on. Being the tech I am, I did the normal troubleshooting such as stripping the box down to just the motherboard, RAM and video card. Still nothing. I decided to take the CMOS battery out as resetting the BIOS was the last idea I had. After I did that, all of a sudden the box started to power on. I was happy for about a half second. Then a flame came from the bottom side of the video card. This scared the shit out of me as I have never seen a literal fire inside a computer. After my reflexes powered the box off, the flame went out on it's own. I was able to get the box up and running with a crappy 32MB PCI card. This lead to me purchasing a new video card. Which of course, is kinda nice as it's better than what I had before. Being a mostly non-gamer though, it's not something I would like to invest money in. I could have bought another hard drive :)
Once my video card arrived in the mail, I had to test it out. I feared one thing in the back of my mind. I was worried there may have been damage to the PCI Express slot. And what do you know, the new card didn't work either. So, I realized at this point that I was now going to have to buy a new motherboard. This is not as easy as it sounds. My desktop came with an 'awesome' BTX motherboard. A failed attempt by Intel to redesign motherboards. Of course, they canceled BTX boards. Neither Newegg nor Tigerdirect even have a single one on their site. I checked out eBay. There were two different boards total. One was shitty, one was fairly better than what I have now. So..., now I am left with the decision. Go with the one single selection of BTX board I can find, or replace the entire case and board.
Couple more weeks go by. At this point, I have just been using my laptop and remote desktop to access my desktop. This worked well. That was, until I got an error from Window's saying it couldn't write a file to the disk. Long story short, my newish 750GB drive is dead. This was my baby. And now, my computer is basically in shambles.
Thankfully, I should be getting some decent money back from my taxes. I owe my mom some money, so she is getting the first dibs on it, but after that, I need to fix this heap of parts. I am also thinking that replacing the power supply may not be a bad idea. With the fire, and the dead hard drive, I think these issues may stem from the power supply failing. Also, it's not a very strong one anyways, it's only rated at 350W and it's running the power hungry Pentium D along 4 hard drives.
Anyhow, I've since been getting a lot of use out of my laptop, but I certainly don't want to kill this thing. I don't really like having it running non-stop.
Now, I hate to turn off or reboot my computer. So, the burner sat in a box for a week or so. Within that time, I came home from work one night to find my computer off. And it wouldn't turn on. Being the tech I am, I did the normal troubleshooting such as stripping the box down to just the motherboard, RAM and video card. Still nothing. I decided to take the CMOS battery out as resetting the BIOS was the last idea I had. After I did that, all of a sudden the box started to power on. I was happy for about a half second. Then a flame came from the bottom side of the video card. This scared the shit out of me as I have never seen a literal fire inside a computer. After my reflexes powered the box off, the flame went out on it's own. I was able to get the box up and running with a crappy 32MB PCI card. This lead to me purchasing a new video card. Which of course, is kinda nice as it's better than what I had before. Being a mostly non-gamer though, it's not something I would like to invest money in. I could have bought another hard drive :)
Once my video card arrived in the mail, I had to test it out. I feared one thing in the back of my mind. I was worried there may have been damage to the PCI Express slot. And what do you know, the new card didn't work either. So, I realized at this point that I was now going to have to buy a new motherboard. This is not as easy as it sounds. My desktop came with an 'awesome' BTX motherboard. A failed attempt by Intel to redesign motherboards. Of course, they canceled BTX boards. Neither Newegg nor Tigerdirect even have a single one on their site. I checked out eBay. There were two different boards total. One was shitty, one was fairly better than what I have now. So..., now I am left with the decision. Go with the one single selection of BTX board I can find, or replace the entire case and board.
Couple more weeks go by. At this point, I have just been using my laptop and remote desktop to access my desktop. This worked well. That was, until I got an error from Window's saying it couldn't write a file to the disk. Long story short, my newish 750GB drive is dead. This was my baby. And now, my computer is basically in shambles.
Thankfully, I should be getting some decent money back from my taxes. I owe my mom some money, so she is getting the first dibs on it, but after that, I need to fix this heap of parts. I am also thinking that replacing the power supply may not be a bad idea. With the fire, and the dead hard drive, I think these issues may stem from the power supply failing. Also, it's not a very strong one anyways, it's only rated at 350W and it's running the power hungry Pentium D along 4 hard drives.
Anyhow, I've since been getting a lot of use out of my laptop, but I certainly don't want to kill this thing. I don't really like having it running non-stop.