now I am thankful there are so many laptops in this house
Gah, computers. My computer has been playing up for months now, completely locking, or occasionally resetting, usually during or shortly after startup. It was very variable though; sometimes it'd be fine for a week or two, then it would play up again. The last couple of weeks it's been constantly bad, and got worse, to the point where it's virtually unusable (it also started getting GPNV errors and having to restore the BIOS from backup). I've checked the memory, so my guess is a hardware fault with either the motherboard, processor or graphics card. That is obviously a problem, especially because I don't have any of either of the latter I can swap in/out to test things. So today I tried reseating things, just on the off chance that'd help. I guessed the odds at 10 to 1 fixed the problem, 4 to 1, made the problem worse, 3 to 1, created a new problem.
The result is that now it's not working at all. Not even doing the power on self-test. It's actually kind of sad when you take the graphics card out of a computer, turn it on and it doesn't give you a viciously angry beep. No POST means either a motherboard or processor fault (I don't know if either is more likely). It's possible I may have damaged the CPU when taking off/putting back on the heat sink - it takes a lot of pressure to clip on - but I've done worse to it in the past I'm sure.
So, I'm kind of out of ideas. I could try poking around some more, checking none of the jumpers or switches have been knocked or anything, but I don't see it doing any rational good, just the chance it might randomly make the computer work again, as these things sometimes do. I'm not really inclined to do that. Leaving me with a computer that doesn't work.
Also today I've been painting the big breezeblock wall that now exists in our garden. Which is a slow process. Two/two and a half hours and a full can of paint later I have at most a third of the wall done with one coat. It's a bit like not looking down with heights; don't look ahead, at the wall you've not painted and it's not so bad. Bloody breezeblocks.
When I've done that I'll have to paint part of the house, which will be much the same thanks to the textured paint.
Last night I got to bed really late, and then got kept awake for even longer by mosquitoes. And two quite large house spiders that I spotted crawled down the curtain towards my head. They say that if you wiped out the human race there'd be no negative ecological effects, but if you wiped out mosquitoes loads of species would die. I say: I'm willing to take the risk.
The result is that now it's not working at all. Not even doing the power on self-test. It's actually kind of sad when you take the graphics card out of a computer, turn it on and it doesn't give you a viciously angry beep. No POST means either a motherboard or processor fault (I don't know if either is more likely). It's possible I may have damaged the CPU when taking off/putting back on the heat sink - it takes a lot of pressure to clip on - but I've done worse to it in the past I'm sure.
So, I'm kind of out of ideas. I could try poking around some more, checking none of the jumpers or switches have been knocked or anything, but I don't see it doing any rational good, just the chance it might randomly make the computer work again, as these things sometimes do. I'm not really inclined to do that. Leaving me with a computer that doesn't work.
Also today I've been painting the big breezeblock wall that now exists in our garden. Which is a slow process. Two/two and a half hours and a full can of paint later I have at most a third of the wall done with one coat. It's a bit like not looking down with heights; don't look ahead, at the wall you've not painted and it's not so bad. Bloody breezeblocks.
When I've done that I'll have to paint part of the house, which will be much the same thanks to the textured paint.
Last night I got to bed really late, and then got kept awake for even longer by mosquitoes. And two quite large house spiders that I spotted crawled down the curtain towards my head. They say that if you wiped out the human race there'd be no negative ecological effects, but if you wiped out mosquitoes loads of species would die. I say: I'm willing to take the risk.