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ciphergothLovely to see everyone last night after so long, and many thanks to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lolliepopp and katyha for a fab night.
However, I am typing this to tell you a Tale of Woe. I got the Computer Blues.
I am typing this at my five-year-old 3kg cheapo laptop. This is because it's the only machine that will connect to the Internet. It has a low resolution screen and is very loud. Every so often the fan fouls up with a nasty grinding noise, and I have to poke it with the back of a fingernail to fix it. I could route the net through it and use my normal laptop, but I lack the gumption.
The machine that I normally use to connect, "trent", seems to be on the point of death. It's my very new, extra-quiet machine that doubles up as the MythTV box and other such goodness. It was working fine when we got back from Italy, but not long after it wedged up solid; the image on the screen was frozen. Switching it off and back on again fixed it. Then it started to wedge up every day. I looked in the logs, and there was no clue: they report everything normal right up to the point at which they fell spookily silent.
This morning I found it was wedged again. I rebooted it, and two hours later it was wedged again. I opened it up to check if it was overheating, and it wasn't, but I turned the fans up to be on the safe side. I tried to compile a new kernel for it, but it started dying in mysterious ways. I tried turning it on and immediately shutting it down again, reasoning that it might like to be cleanly shut down for the first time in a while. But now it fails horribly when it tries to boot: it can't even initialize its virtual consoles.
I thought it might be the memory, but I don't have any other DDR memory in the house to try - all the other computers are too old. I tried booting from a CD-ROM and that seems to work fine, so maybe it isn't the memory, maybe it's the hard drive. I have an identical, brand new hard drive sitting in a box halfway across the room, but I don't have a second SATA lead, and the effort of sorting it out seems positively Herculean at the moment.
I'm sleep-deprived, surrounded by mess and computer bits, and I don't have the will to do anything about any of it.
And I discovered when I did get Internet this morning that I'd been joe-jobbed, and I had 600 bounce messages from a "Cialis" spam waiting for me.
Bah.
lolliepopp and katyha for a fab night.However, I am typing this to tell you a Tale of Woe. I got the Computer Blues.
I am typing this at my five-year-old 3kg cheapo laptop. This is because it's the only machine that will connect to the Internet. It has a low resolution screen and is very loud. Every so often the fan fouls up with a nasty grinding noise, and I have to poke it with the back of a fingernail to fix it. I could route the net through it and use my normal laptop, but I lack the gumption.
The machine that I normally use to connect, "trent", seems to be on the point of death. It's my very new, extra-quiet machine that doubles up as the MythTV box and other such goodness. It was working fine when we got back from Italy, but not long after it wedged up solid; the image on the screen was frozen. Switching it off and back on again fixed it. Then it started to wedge up every day. I looked in the logs, and there was no clue: they report everything normal right up to the point at which they fell spookily silent.
This morning I found it was wedged again. I rebooted it, and two hours later it was wedged again. I opened it up to check if it was overheating, and it wasn't, but I turned the fans up to be on the safe side. I tried to compile a new kernel for it, but it started dying in mysterious ways. I tried turning it on and immediately shutting it down again, reasoning that it might like to be cleanly shut down for the first time in a while. But now it fails horribly when it tries to boot: it can't even initialize its virtual consoles.
I thought it might be the memory, but I don't have any other DDR memory in the house to try - all the other computers are too old. I tried booting from a CD-ROM and that seems to work fine, so maybe it isn't the memory, maybe it's the hard drive. I have an identical, brand new hard drive sitting in a box halfway across the room, but I don't have a second SATA lead, and the effort of sorting it out seems positively Herculean at the moment.
I'm sleep-deprived, surrounded by mess and computer bits, and I don't have the will to do anything about any of it.
And I discovered when I did get Internet this morning that I'd been joe-jobbed, and I had 600 bounce messages from a "Cialis" spam waiting for me.
Bah.
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no subject
Date: 2005-09-25 11:11 pm (UTC)I suggest underclocking everything. That should increase the reliability of the electronics, in case the problem is there.
You can also put in the blank hard drive and install whatever OS is the least effort. If the computer works, your old startup disk is fried.