techno joy and techno fear
After the PC probs of the last week or so, this cheered me up no end!
(CAUTION - Strong language on occasion)
October 27, 2007
October 23, 2007
It works! But learn to practice what you preach…
A new motherboard later, the machine is finally working. Windows & Office installed, Email Addresses, contacts and diary retrieved from the SPV M3100. Took 2 days to discover that the problem was a short in the motherboard caused by something dislodging when it was moved from room to room.
Whenever one of the congregation comes to me for computer advice I tell them that the most important (and useful) thing to do is to make frequent back-ups of all their data. Sometimes I need to listen to myself - why is it I never seem to take my own advice? The last backup I made to the external hard drive was 10 months ago, and that (I discovered this morning) was accidentally overwritten by the PVR. So thats 6 years of work down the loo - sermons, adapted liturgies, artwork, music, edited movies. All of it. Including the stuff I had prepared for the baptism this weekend and the wedding I have in 2 weeks time. One of these days I will learn to listen to myself!
Anyone know how to retrieve data from 2 apparently corrupted SATA drives in a RAID configuration?
October 20, 2007
Continuing PC woes
It doesnt seem to have been the power supply after all and I’m stumped. We’ve managed to get it to power-up at least to enter the BIOS, but it cant seem to find windows boot information. Imany need to re-install. Hopefuly a windows reinstall is all it will take, rather than new hardware. Luckily I have all my work and art stuff on a separate physical hard drive, not the same one on which windows is installed. Email addresses are all backed up to my phone, but emails aren’t.
Reinstalling windows is something I’m used to - I do it around once a year anyway to make sure my machine runs at its best. I usually like to do a full back-up first though. Not this time, unfortunately.
October 19, 2007
I need geekish help…
for my PC has died.
Firstly - the machine: its a Gigabyte GA-965-s3 motherboard with an intel core2 6300CPU (1.86GHz), 3GBram (DDR2 dual channel), 2x 250GB HDD’s, running WinXPpro, with a NvidiaGeForce 7900GS graphics card with 500mb ram.
And now the problem: the machine (which was built by my own hands and had been working perfectly for a windows machine) was moved to another room whilst the study gets a makeover. Alan set it up and turned it on. It didn’t like that. For the tecchies amongst you, I got a continuous short-beep POST, the machine powered down and re-powered independant of any action by me.
What I’ve done: checked all cables are properly connected; removed, cleaned and reseated all pci cards; attempted bootup with minimal setup. All to no avail - same short-beep continuous POST and powerdown before self-powering to do the same again. (I havent found any information on the Gigabyte website regarding the POST codes.)
I’m thinking that the problem lies with the Power Supply - a Blue Storm. Its 6 months old, replacing the last one (same model) which died. But before I fork out on another power supply I’d appreciate a 2nd opionion from someone more geeky than me.
UPDATE continuous short beeps is a power issue - finally managed to find the relevant information (only took 2 hours!) Given that I built this machine 10 months ago and that this is the 2nd Blue Storm that’s died, I think I’ll be getting a different power supply this time…
October 12, 2007
Router issues
Router problems and dodgy email servers are leaving me with limited connectivity at the moment. Blogging will be random and sparse until the new shiny replacement arrives.
