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psipsyHere's what I'm up against lately: I think the motherboard in my flagship computer is starting to fail. Basically, it won't always boot up, it doesn't even get to the BIOS screen. I can sometimes nurture it to boot the whole way, and once it does, it's fine. It has all kinds of fancy built-in diagnostics, and they're pointing to the video card having problems. So I bought another video card (thankfully before the prices went insane). That didn't fix it. So I pulled the card out entirely and used the onboard video. That didn't fix it. Hm, the BIOS chip is in a socket, so I'll give that a squish. That fixed it... For all of a week. Ah shit, it's not looking good.
Searches on the internet have been marginally helpful at best. Folks with the same type of motherboard and the same issues have reported various fixes with mixed results. According to these various fixes, it's narrowed down to... Anything and everything. Great, that's a big help.
I'll go for the low-hanging fruit first, the stuff I can easily swap around. Power supply, RAM, hard drives. The nice thing about having a bunch of computers is having a pool of spare parts to work with, and a testbed for suspect parts. If it turns out to be the motherboard, I won't be happy because it's what everything connects to but that's still within reason. I can still find replacements, albeit either used or as old-new stock.
Worst case scenario is I have to replace the motherboard, CPU, and memory as a whole set. What makes that the worst-case is installing Windows 7 on new hardware is trickier than it used to be because there's a lot less support for it than there used to be. It's not impossible, there are ways, just gotta be a little sneakier about it.
Windows 10? Hah. I've already let my feelings be known about that feral pitbull of an operating system. If I threw a frisbee, Windows 7 would chase after it, catch it, and bring it back. Windows 10 would also chase after it, but then chew on it where it lands, and growl at me if I try taking it.
It's not like I don't have any other computers to use, and I can reuse many of the parts for other builds, it just sucks because I paid a good bit of money for high-end hardware (about $250 just for the mobo in question) and got less than 5 years out of something that's still more powerful than many computers being currently sold. I got a few more tricks up my sleeve, so I haven't lost yet.
To be continued!
Searches on the internet have been marginally helpful at best. Folks with the same type of motherboard and the same issues have reported various fixes with mixed results. According to these various fixes, it's narrowed down to... Anything and everything. Great, that's a big help.
I'll go for the low-hanging fruit first, the stuff I can easily swap around. Power supply, RAM, hard drives. The nice thing about having a bunch of computers is having a pool of spare parts to work with, and a testbed for suspect parts. If it turns out to be the motherboard, I won't be happy because it's what everything connects to but that's still within reason. I can still find replacements, albeit either used or as old-new stock.
Worst case scenario is I have to replace the motherboard, CPU, and memory as a whole set. What makes that the worst-case is installing Windows 7 on new hardware is trickier than it used to be because there's a lot less support for it than there used to be. It's not impossible, there are ways, just gotta be a little sneakier about it.
Windows 10? Hah. I've already let my feelings be known about that feral pitbull of an operating system. If I threw a frisbee, Windows 7 would chase after it, catch it, and bring it back. Windows 10 would also chase after it, but then chew on it where it lands, and growl at me if I try taking it.
It's not like I don't have any other computers to use, and I can reuse many of the parts for other builds, it just sucks because I paid a good bit of money for high-end hardware (about $250 just for the mobo in question) and got less than 5 years out of something that's still more powerful than many computers being currently sold. I got a few more tricks up my sleeve, so I haven't lost yet.
To be continued!
