Computer Trouble, Arg!
It all started on a warm November morning here in Sunny California. lapizlaz's monitor did not want to come on. It was a 5 year old Viewsonic LCD that has been a bit flaky recently. Since lapizlaz works from home, I figured we should replace it with an nice 19" widescreen. Off to Staples where they have one on sale, out of stock. Off to Costco and we get another Viewsonic LCD. This one has a 2ms refresh rate and is a 19" widescreen. Back at home, lapizlaz's computer's video card could not run the proper resolution of 1440 by 900. We don't want to buy a new video card so I ended up with the new monitor.
It's rather nice, but much brighter than the old one, had to tone it down a bit.
That was on Sunday and when I got home from work on Monday my computer would not start up. It would come on for a few seconds and then go off. It had done this before, so I was just leaving it on till I could figure out why. It had turned itself off and did not want to play. I called a friend who is a computer tech for some advice. We did several things and after removing all the boards and the memory sticks, it started up. He guessed it might be a bad stick. I put everything back except for the bad stick and the hard drive and it started up fine. So I took in back to my desk and plugged in all the cables and started it up only to have it repeat the original problem. After some tinkering I discovered it could not power up a hard drive. (Tested this with several old drives sitting about.)
I guessed it was the power supply that was the problem after all. After work on Tuesday I stopped by a computer store and got a new supply. This one was 350 watts and had a very large cooling fan. It was built by Powerman, a decent manufacturer as far as I can tell. I installed it and the machine powered right up, but would not boot. So I put in my original XP CD and rewrote the boot sector and now all is well.
Thank the Lord for that. I had not backed up my mail or documents since August!! (Other stuff was current). Guess one tends to get lazy with backing up, so hopefully I will not be lazy in the future. The only other casualty was my mouse stopped working. We we do keep a spare, but we have it on lapislaz's machine. Her Logitech wireless mouse was acting up. I am currently using the wireless till we get another mouse. It is not bad, but it does not understand Tad.
It's rather nice, but much brighter than the old one, had to tone it down a bit.
That was on Sunday and when I got home from work on Monday my computer would not start up. It would come on for a few seconds and then go off. It had done this before, so I was just leaving it on till I could figure out why. It had turned itself off and did not want to play. I called a friend who is a computer tech for some advice. We did several things and after removing all the boards and the memory sticks, it started up. He guessed it might be a bad stick. I put everything back except for the bad stick and the hard drive and it started up fine. So I took in back to my desk and plugged in all the cables and started it up only to have it repeat the original problem. After some tinkering I discovered it could not power up a hard drive. (Tested this with several old drives sitting about.)
I guessed it was the power supply that was the problem after all. After work on Tuesday I stopped by a computer store and got a new supply. This one was 350 watts and had a very large cooling fan. It was built by Powerman, a decent manufacturer as far as I can tell. I installed it and the machine powered right up, but would not boot. So I put in my original XP CD and rewrote the boot sector and now all is well.
Thank the Lord for that. I had not backed up my mail or documents since August!! (Other stuff was current). Guess one tends to get lazy with backing up, so hopefully I will not be lazy in the future. The only other casualty was my mouse stopped working. We we do keep a spare, but we have it on lapislaz's machine. Her Logitech wireless mouse was acting up. I am currently using the wireless till we get another mouse. It is not bad, but it does not understand Tad.