StupiD! StuPiD! STUPID!
April 25th, 2009 11:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
uhsirI just spent the last 4 days and late nights trying to get my computer working again after I almost killed it.
I decided the suggestions from you all were a good idea and that I needed to get away from the computer. So on Wednesday I shut everything down and busied myself with straightening up and organizing my computer room. That took a good couple of hours. Then I figured it would be a good time to upgrade the RAM on the ole desktop. I'd been wanting to max it out for a long time.
I built the computer in 2003 giving it 1 GB of RAM, a decent amount back then, and since that build I only had to upgrade the video card and replace the power supply. Lately I've been having a lot of horrible lag in Movie Maker so taking the RAM up to 3 GB would help. So I rushed out to the only computer store within an hour's drive (not counting Best Buy because I don't shop at that chain store anymore since some punk kid at the service desk in the store up where we used to live treated me like trash, grrrr). Anyway, going in I wasn't real sure about this place but they came highly recommended. *snort*
I go into the store, carrying the user's manual from my motherboard with me just in case the techie person wanted to get all geeky about it. Well, I keep forgetting that I'm living in Hooterville now. There are two fellas in the shop and one of them is working on a computer and the other greets me. I tell him what my motherboard is, show him my pretty little user's manual and that I want to get three 1GB DIMMs of DDR SDRAM. His eyes are glazed over by this time but he says okay, gets some packs of RAM off a rack and puts them on the counter. Manufacturer: Patriot. It's the only brand they have. I've never heard of it. I should have told him no thanks. But this place came highly recommended. So I tell him to ring it up. $177. OMG!
When we got home we had some stuff to do so I couldn't get to putting them in until later that evening. When I finally got to it, I put in all 3 sticks and powered it up. The BIOS memory test recognized all of the memory. Yay! Windows started to load and after a few seconds the computer rebooted. Argh! I took out the new RAM and put in the old RAM, booted it up, Windows started to load and... the computer rebooted. I played around with it for a bit then quit. It was very late now and I was getting too mad to work on it.
Thursday I took another look at things but was stumped. I called my stepson and he said he'd drop by after work. So I busied myself going through all of the stuff I kept from when I put the system together. Oh dear, I should have done that first. One of the things I'd forgotten is that this motherboard is very finicky about RAM and the only brands that are stable on it are Corsair or Kingston, and of those only the upper end models. Now I'm worried that I fried something on the board with the crap generic RAM. I spent the rest of the day doing other stuff and getting crabbier because now I may never get to finish the video for the Kawoosh contest and I've also promised to do some ripping for a friend that I'm not going to be able to do. I'm getting really crabby. So much for not stressing about the video. This was a stupid thing to try to do right now.
My stepson gets there and bangs around for a bit and tells me he's seen this behavior before and it's probably one of two things or even both... Either the hard drive is corrupt or the power supply is crapping out. He suggested I try replacing the hard drive first because they are returnable and power supplies are not. He said Walmart might have one. Eek! Walmart for computer parts? Well that's only a few miles from my house, open 24 hours and it's too late to go to the other store that's a half hour drive away. I went to Walmart, they had one, same manufacturer as what I had in the system only 4 times the storage, so I bought it. Get it home, get it in, get out the Windows install CD and... It's an upgrade that requires me to have my old Win98 CD to do the install. Great!! That's packed in some box in some room but I don't know where. Hubby and I start digging but can't find it. Maybe I gave it to Good Will when we moved forgetting I'd need it? Dammit! I get on the laptop and dig around to see if I can find some kind soul who put it up. I finally find a Spanish version, good enough, but it's going to take an hour or two to download. By now it's really late and I'm too tired so I went to bed. My mood is very bad and hubby is telling me to just toss this one and let's go buy a new one.
Friday I get the Win98 down, put in the drive, reinstall the new RAM and start going through the install process. I kept getting STOP errors, each time I'd go to the laptop and check out what it meant. The first one was either the CD/DVD unit was bad or memory was bad. The second time it got a little further before dying. This error was either hardware conflict or bad memory. I fiddle with stuff and set the BIOS to defaults. The next error was either bad hardware or defective RAM. Okay, in my book it's three strikes you're out. I took out the new RAM and put in the old. The fourth try worked perfectly. Stupid crap generic RAM!!
Time to test the new RAM. I took out the old and put in one new stick. Started up Memtest86 and waited. It found errors. I wrote everything down, shut down, swapped in another stick and powered up. Or tried to. No power. I checked everything but nothing happened. The power supply was completely dead. It's less than two years old! Dammit!!! I slammed my fist down on the desk, hard, my little finger's knuckle is still hurting. As I walked out of the room I kicked a box of old 3.5 floppies. It's still laying there with the disks scattered around. Hubby came to see what was wrong and again suggested getting a new desktop. I told him no. That's thousands of dollars and running Vista. Blech!! Even if I have to spend a couple hundred on this one it'll be worth it. I just need to stay calm and think rationally.
Today we went to the computer store and got a new power supply. I debated going there or getting it through Newegg for a lot less money. But that would mean waiting about a week. So the extra expense would have to be worth it. As soon as we got home I put it in and everything booted up nicely. I was curious about the old hard drive so I put in the old RAM and connected up the old drive and tried to boot up but it still reset at the Windows load. I was sure the RAM is crap so I started testing each one again. All three errored. Horribly. Just to be sure, I put in one of the old sticks and tested it. No errors. Stupid crap generic RAM!!! I checked the time and if I hurried I could get to the store and return it. This time there was a real tech-type guy so when I showed him my little paper with all the test results on it he refunded my money. He said he uses that brand in his system and it's fine but he thinks this batch they have is bad.
When we got home I finished up with the Windows install. Then I connected up the old drive as a slave and I can see everything on it. Well that's good so now I can copy stuff over. The very next thing was getting all of my Movie Maker stuff installed. I tested it out and I think it's all back together.
Maybe the old hard drive is fine and just the boot sector got corrupted and it only needs a reformat? So if I do that then I could take back the new drive. Pfffffuh! Not gonna happen. Besides, six years is old for a hard drive I'm scared it'll crap out again. I still might keep it in and try using it for my video source files which will help WMM work better but I'll keep a copy on the external that I currently have them on.
So after 4 days of hell I still don't have the RAM upgrade. I'm going to wait until after I get to that ripping and finish the video.
I decided the suggestions from you all were a good idea and that I needed to get away from the computer. So on Wednesday I shut everything down and busied myself with straightening up and organizing my computer room. That took a good couple of hours. Then I figured it would be a good time to upgrade the RAM on the ole desktop. I'd been wanting to max it out for a long time.
I built the computer in 2003 giving it 1 GB of RAM, a decent amount back then, and since that build I only had to upgrade the video card and replace the power supply. Lately I've been having a lot of horrible lag in Movie Maker so taking the RAM up to 3 GB would help. So I rushed out to the only computer store within an hour's drive (not counting Best Buy because I don't shop at that chain store anymore since some punk kid at the service desk in the store up where we used to live treated me like trash, grrrr). Anyway, going in I wasn't real sure about this place but they came highly recommended. *snort*
I go into the store, carrying the user's manual from my motherboard with me just in case the techie person wanted to get all geeky about it. Well, I keep forgetting that I'm living in Hooterville now. There are two fellas in the shop and one of them is working on a computer and the other greets me. I tell him what my motherboard is, show him my pretty little user's manual and that I want to get three 1GB DIMMs of DDR SDRAM. His eyes are glazed over by this time but he says okay, gets some packs of RAM off a rack and puts them on the counter. Manufacturer: Patriot. It's the only brand they have. I've never heard of it. I should have told him no thanks. But this place came highly recommended. So I tell him to ring it up. $177. OMG!
When we got home we had some stuff to do so I couldn't get to putting them in until later that evening. When I finally got to it, I put in all 3 sticks and powered it up. The BIOS memory test recognized all of the memory. Yay! Windows started to load and after a few seconds the computer rebooted. Argh! I took out the new RAM and put in the old RAM, booted it up, Windows started to load and... the computer rebooted. I played around with it for a bit then quit. It was very late now and I was getting too mad to work on it.
Thursday I took another look at things but was stumped. I called my stepson and he said he'd drop by after work. So I busied myself going through all of the stuff I kept from when I put the system together. Oh dear, I should have done that first. One of the things I'd forgotten is that this motherboard is very finicky about RAM and the only brands that are stable on it are Corsair or Kingston, and of those only the upper end models. Now I'm worried that I fried something on the board with the crap generic RAM. I spent the rest of the day doing other stuff and getting crabbier because now I may never get to finish the video for the Kawoosh contest and I've also promised to do some ripping for a friend that I'm not going to be able to do. I'm getting really crabby. So much for not stressing about the video. This was a stupid thing to try to do right now.
My stepson gets there and bangs around for a bit and tells me he's seen this behavior before and it's probably one of two things or even both... Either the hard drive is corrupt or the power supply is crapping out. He suggested I try replacing the hard drive first because they are returnable and power supplies are not. He said Walmart might have one. Eek! Walmart for computer parts? Well that's only a few miles from my house, open 24 hours and it's too late to go to the other store that's a half hour drive away. I went to Walmart, they had one, same manufacturer as what I had in the system only 4 times the storage, so I bought it. Get it home, get it in, get out the Windows install CD and... It's an upgrade that requires me to have my old Win98 CD to do the install. Great!! That's packed in some box in some room but I don't know where. Hubby and I start digging but can't find it. Maybe I gave it to Good Will when we moved forgetting I'd need it? Dammit! I get on the laptop and dig around to see if I can find some kind soul who put it up. I finally find a Spanish version, good enough, but it's going to take an hour or two to download. By now it's really late and I'm too tired so I went to bed. My mood is very bad and hubby is telling me to just toss this one and let's go buy a new one.
Friday I get the Win98 down, put in the drive, reinstall the new RAM and start going through the install process. I kept getting STOP errors, each time I'd go to the laptop and check out what it meant. The first one was either the CD/DVD unit was bad or memory was bad. The second time it got a little further before dying. This error was either hardware conflict or bad memory. I fiddle with stuff and set the BIOS to defaults. The next error was either bad hardware or defective RAM. Okay, in my book it's three strikes you're out. I took out the new RAM and put in the old. The fourth try worked perfectly. Stupid crap generic RAM!!
Time to test the new RAM. I took out the old and put in one new stick. Started up Memtest86 and waited. It found errors. I wrote everything down, shut down, swapped in another stick and powered up. Or tried to. No power. I checked everything but nothing happened. The power supply was completely dead. It's less than two years old! Dammit!!! I slammed my fist down on the desk, hard, my little finger's knuckle is still hurting. As I walked out of the room I kicked a box of old 3.5 floppies. It's still laying there with the disks scattered around. Hubby came to see what was wrong and again suggested getting a new desktop. I told him no. That's thousands of dollars and running Vista. Blech!! Even if I have to spend a couple hundred on this one it'll be worth it. I just need to stay calm and think rationally.
Today we went to the computer store and got a new power supply. I debated going there or getting it through Newegg for a lot less money. But that would mean waiting about a week. So the extra expense would have to be worth it. As soon as we got home I put it in and everything booted up nicely. I was curious about the old hard drive so I put in the old RAM and connected up the old drive and tried to boot up but it still reset at the Windows load. I was sure the RAM is crap so I started testing each one again. All three errored. Horribly. Just to be sure, I put in one of the old sticks and tested it. No errors. Stupid crap generic RAM!!! I checked the time and if I hurried I could get to the store and return it. This time there was a real tech-type guy so when I showed him my little paper with all the test results on it he refunded my money. He said he uses that brand in his system and it's fine but he thinks this batch they have is bad.
When we got home I finished up with the Windows install. Then I connected up the old drive as a slave and I can see everything on it. Well that's good so now I can copy stuff over. The very next thing was getting all of my Movie Maker stuff installed. I tested it out and I think it's all back together.
Maybe the old hard drive is fine and just the boot sector got corrupted and it only needs a reformat? So if I do that then I could take back the new drive. Pfffffuh! Not gonna happen. Besides, six years is old for a hard drive I'm scared it'll crap out again. I still might keep it in and try using it for my video source files which will help WMM work better but I'll keep a copy on the external that I currently have them on.
So after 4 days of hell I still don't have the RAM upgrade. I'm going to wait until after I get to that ripping and finish the video.
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Date: April 26th, 2009 01:57 pm (UTC)