I hate PCs!
Monday Apr 09, 2007
Sigh. Once again, I'm befuddled by PC problems at home. For some reason, on Friday, our home PC (yeah, I'm not much of a geek, I only have one PC :-)) started acting really strange. After being up for some time, it would go dead. Well, not completely. The disk activity light would go on and stay on, but the monitor would go to power save mode as if it had no signal from the PC, and the system would not respond to mouse clicks and typing from the keyboard. Nothing. The only way to get out of this mode is to kill the power.
The times that this happens are either just randomly, or when you click a mouse button. Or at least that is what appears to be happening. Perhaps the mouse button business is coincidence.
Another interesting symptom that I noticed this morning was that the BIOS claimed the floppy drive was the "wrong type." Looking at the BIOS settings, the type matches the physical type of floppy drive. This makes me suspect a hardware problem, as at this point, during boot, we haven't even started running Windows XP.
So the problem now is, I'm not a hardware guy. Of course, working in the computer industry, my family depends on me to figure out what's gone wrong and fix it. Only thing I can think of doing that's within my limited diagnosis capacity is to replace the disk cables. But given the problems, I've begun to suspect something with the IDE controller on the motherboard itself, since the floppy drive and the hard drives are on different cables.
At some point here, I reach the end of my limited diagnosis capabilities, so I have to decide whether to try to get this machine repaired or to replace the system. I'm not really keen on migrating to a new machine, as it's a lot of work, particularly since I'd have to hook up the old drives to the new machine, at least temporarily. Yuk. Guess I could just buy a new motherboard and try to use the rest of the existing hardware with it.
So, I'm going to try replacing cables and see if it makes any difference. I doubt it will, but it's a cheap thing to try on my own before either handing it over to a professional or buying a new motherboard or PC.
More on this later....
Update
I took my PC to a local computer shop this morning, and after describing the symptoms, the clerk opened the case, took out the fan and told me the motherboard was fried. Some capacitors were all gooey on top. He said I'd need at least a new motherboard, but that the case wasn't really suitable for a new motherboard, so I'd need a new case. Add in that the memory on the existing PC is too old for a newer motherboard, and we're talking a few hundred bucks. Well, what I really care about is the data on the disks, and they had some low end PCs in the low to mid $400 range, so I'll probably buy one of these and recover my data by plugging in each of the disks in turn and copying the data or just leaving the disk there.
My big gripe about all this is it appears the parts used on the motherboard were cheap and not intended to last more than a few years. Unfortunately, planned obselesence has struck. And it's a bit of an emergency, as TurboTax Online expects me to use a PC or Mac to use their service (that's another gripe).
