Adventures in Silicon
Mar. 15th, 2003 11:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ephraimjohnFor some time now, my PC has been acting up. It's not really caused enough problems to force a rebuild, but has generated enough enough annoyance and infuriation by the occasional random lock-up and crash, that I decided to take this week to finally address the problem. Things did not exactly go according to plan...
I started, as all good IT bods will tell you is wise, by taking a major backup of all my important system files. I downloaded up-to-date drivers, and took images of my hdds with Ghost ( a program that allows you to create a compressed backup of all your data). I decided that a fresh install of windows XP was definitely the way to go. It is a well known adage in PC computing circles that "whatever you least expect to go wrong, will"; but I was pretty confident that in my 8 years of systems support, I'd seen pretty much everything that there was to see. Damn me for my cockiness.
There was a time, when an O/S (operating system, for those non-techies out there) would fit onto 3 floppy disks. You'd throw the floppies into the drive one at a time, and after a few minutes, you'd have a fully functionalbattlestation PC. However, since Mr Gates decided some time ago that it was necessary to impress us all with Mac-style tellytubby graphics and whirly slidey menus, PC operating systems have got larger and larger. XP Professional is a hamburger-snarfing, Elvis in glittery spandex, dead on the toilet, bloater of an operating system; and as such takes a mere 6 floppy disks to install the installation program for it. And then, it starts to install from the CD. In addition, it has some of the most draconian anti-piracy protection known to man. And so it was, that having wrestled with the jumper settings on my hdds to get the correct one with the correct drive letter, and the machine to boot at all, that my XP disk just plain refused to work. "Error copying some random bloatware file that allows us to track everything you do on the intaweb". "System will restart, press ok to watch you machine be broken". Aside from the question of why I have to press ok to accept the only option I'm given, XP seems unwilling to uninstall the setup portion of itself, leaving you with no option but to reformat the drive. This is not a quick procedure.
So - time to try a different plan. Windows 2000 pro is my favourite O/S. I know that having a favourite O/S is a sad and geeky thing, but then I'm a sad and geeky man. So... armed with a copy of W2k pro (as we in the trade call it) I tried that. Sure enough, an hour later, I had a fresh and fine install of W2k pro on my machine. This was where the problems started. 2 years of fps (first person shooter - a type of game) abuse seems to have finally taken it's toll on my mouse. With one last flicker of its pretty red light, my cheap but functional optical rodent gave up the ghost. Leaving me with a cheap but non-functional rodent. Oh, the joy! Cue much scrabbling around in boxes finding lot of other broken mice. This went on for a some time, until I finally gave up and decided that it was time to buy a new mouse. One visit to the Amazon website later, and a new mouse was winging its way to me via the postman. Having had problems with RSI from mice in the past, I decided to go for a decent make of mouse this time, and so ended up spending far more money than I should on an expensive mouse. Astonishingly the Royal Mail (or consignia, or whatever they are called today) managed to deliver the next day! So, it was back to the rebuild!
Working mouse installed, next problem was the network. I spent a good two hours battling to allow my machine to see Ian's machine. It was after two hours, when I was really infuriated with the silly thing, that I realised that one of the furry engines of destruction had unplugged the power cable from the hub! As soon as I plugged the stupid thing in, all was well. Feeling exceedingly stupid, the rebuild went on.
That's when the blue screens started, and the machine began to reboot itself. This is never a good thing. Random reboots and blue screens are indications that something is very wrong indeed. And it didn't take me too long to find out what. The usual operating temperature for an AMD Athlon CPU (which is the heart of my beast) should be 50-55 degrees centigrade. It's safe-ish to run an Athlon up to about 70 degrees. Looking at the readings from the motherboard sensor, my CPU was running at about 96 degrees. To say that this is bad is a bit of an understatement. Profanity followed. In quantity.
It turns out that the thermal compound that moves heat from the CPU core to the heatsink had gone. I have no idea where it went, but it wasn't in the machine anymore. I suspect that it decided to head to Verona with Ian, and stowed away in his hand luggage. It's probably sunning itself on a balcony in Italy right now. Lucky little compound.
Anyway, work ground to a halt again. And friday morning I took a walk up to the local computer store to get a new heatsink/fan/compund/cooling system. The shop isn't close, so it was a five mile walk each way. Thankfully, it was a nice day, and walking made me feel a bit better about myself, being the first exercise that I've had in a while. 8 pounds later, I was the proud owner of a vastly superior fan assembly. This duly affixed, the rebuild continued.
From there on in, it was pretty hassle free; a couple of software issues aside. I now have, touch wood, a working PC with a mouse that is, quite frankly, lovely; and a CPU running at (currently) 51 degrees. Win 2k pro seems to be behaving itself, and all of my data is intact. However, all of these shenanigans have made me realise that I am vastly out of practice at troubleshooting hardware issues. If anyone needs help with any machine rebuilds please feel free to let me know. I need to get back up to speed on my tech support.
I started, as all good IT bods will tell you is wise, by taking a major backup of all my important system files. I downloaded up-to-date drivers, and took images of my hdds with Ghost ( a program that allows you to create a compressed backup of all your data). I decided that a fresh install of windows XP was definitely the way to go. It is a well known adage in PC computing circles that "whatever you least expect to go wrong, will"; but I was pretty confident that in my 8 years of systems support, I'd seen pretty much everything that there was to see. Damn me for my cockiness.
There was a time, when an O/S (operating system, for those non-techies out there) would fit onto 3 floppy disks. You'd throw the floppies into the drive one at a time, and after a few minutes, you'd have a fully functional
So - time to try a different plan. Windows 2000 pro is my favourite O/S. I know that having a favourite O/S is a sad and geeky thing, but then I'm a sad and geeky man. So... armed with a copy of W2k pro (as we in the trade call it) I tried that. Sure enough, an hour later, I had a fresh and fine install of W2k pro on my machine. This was where the problems started. 2 years of fps (first person shooter - a type of game) abuse seems to have finally taken it's toll on my mouse. With one last flicker of its pretty red light, my cheap but functional optical rodent gave up the ghost. Leaving me with a cheap but non-functional rodent. Oh, the joy! Cue much scrabbling around in boxes finding lot of other broken mice. This went on for a some time, until I finally gave up and decided that it was time to buy a new mouse. One visit to the Amazon website later, and a new mouse was winging its way to me via the postman. Having had problems with RSI from mice in the past, I decided to go for a decent make of mouse this time, and so ended up spending far more money than I should on an expensive mouse. Astonishingly the Royal Mail (or consignia, or whatever they are called today) managed to deliver the next day! So, it was back to the rebuild!
Working mouse installed, next problem was the network. I spent a good two hours battling to allow my machine to see Ian's machine. It was after two hours, when I was really infuriated with the silly thing, that I realised that one of the furry engines of destruction had unplugged the power cable from the hub! As soon as I plugged the stupid thing in, all was well. Feeling exceedingly stupid, the rebuild went on.
That's when the blue screens started, and the machine began to reboot itself. This is never a good thing. Random reboots and blue screens are indications that something is very wrong indeed. And it didn't take me too long to find out what. The usual operating temperature for an AMD Athlon CPU (which is the heart of my beast) should be 50-55 degrees centigrade. It's safe-ish to run an Athlon up to about 70 degrees. Looking at the readings from the motherboard sensor, my CPU was running at about 96 degrees. To say that this is bad is a bit of an understatement. Profanity followed. In quantity.
It turns out that the thermal compound that moves heat from the CPU core to the heatsink had gone. I have no idea where it went, but it wasn't in the machine anymore. I suspect that it decided to head to Verona with Ian, and stowed away in his hand luggage. It's probably sunning itself on a balcony in Italy right now. Lucky little compound.
Anyway, work ground to a halt again. And friday morning I took a walk up to the local computer store to get a new heatsink/fan/compund/cooling system. The shop isn't close, so it was a five mile walk each way. Thankfully, it was a nice day, and walking made me feel a bit better about myself, being the first exercise that I've had in a while. 8 pounds later, I was the proud owner of a vastly superior fan assembly. This duly affixed, the rebuild continued.
From there on in, it was pretty hassle free; a couple of software issues aside. I now have, touch wood, a working PC with a mouse that is, quite frankly, lovely; and a CPU running at (currently) 51 degrees. Win 2k pro seems to be behaving itself, and all of my data is intact. However, all of these shenanigans have made me realise that I am vastly out of practice at troubleshooting hardware issues. If anyone needs help with any machine rebuilds please feel free to let me know. I need to get back up to speed on my tech support.
