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[personal profile] slycat
What a nightmare I've been having with my PC. I went to a LAN party yesterday and despite a poor turnout, had fun and met some people I used to know from school who I hadn't seen since then (6yrs) so that was nice. Packed up and went home at 6pm, nothing unusual happened to my machine that I can remeber, it was packed in the back of the car yet when I got home and plugged in my system, all I got was the sodding BSOD when Windows started!

Tried all number of things short of a reinstall and to no avail, checked all components and things and couldn't understand what was going wrong considering it was fine a few hours earlier and all that had happened to the machine inbetween is that it had been transported from one location to another. This said to me it must be a hardware fault, something must be damaged but I couldn't see what as nothing was giving me any clues. So I bit the bullet and decided to reinstall Windows but the first thing the Windows said was "Unable to determine what system type you have" or something to that effect. That just made me think it must be the motherboard...

So I went off to PC World to get me a new mainboard and was suprised to find that PC World stocked the latest mobo I had my eyes on, one by ABIT (NF7-S). They didn't have my first choice, one by ASUS but this was just as good. £100 later, I was the proud owner of the latest motherboard money can buy at the time. By the time I was home, my brother was about so as he is a computer engineer, he ran some further tests on the system and they all came out clear. Despite this, he went ahead and installed the new motherboard for me.

One rather major oversight was that the memory I had for the old motherboard didn't work with the new board. It seems that the new motherboard only works with DDR ram. I had to borrow one of my brother's 512mb chips while I pay another £70 for a new 512mb chip. Bleh!

With the board installed, Windows would load even less than it did before! So I got the Windows CD and proceeded to reinstall it. After a few hiccups, Windows finally got installed and now I have a stable system. However, I still want to copy over my important files and then do a clean install of Windows. I'll do that a bit later as I'm a bit pooped after all this, £170 later. I think I'll have to think twice about going to LAN parties int he future or at least how I pack it as I don't want to have to go through all this again.

Date: 2003-04-14 09:13 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] sphelx.livejournal.com
When you say you "checked all components" Do you mean you lifted out all the PCI/AGP card(s ) and then reseated them?

Cos that's the problem i have, the cards jiggle loose (i get a BIOS bleepy message).

Sphelx,

Date: 2003-04-14 11:45 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] slycat.livejournal.com
Nah, it wasn't anything like that, nothing was pointing to a hardware fault... It must have been Windows in the end as it was a bit flaky before hand.

Re:

Date: 2003-04-15 03:15 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] sphelx.livejournal.com
Windows is always good to blame :>

Sphelx,

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