Monday February 11, 2002 at 12:05 pm

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Okay I’ve actually found some time to write, amazingly enough, though I haven’t been that busy, I’ve been unmotivated lately to actually blog. No it’s no ones fault or anything, it’s just I’ve had other things I’ve been working on, mainly my systems, which I might add are getting on my last nerves. Not so much the new 1.2 system but the older one, which has now become my backup and work horse. I’m beginning to think it is taking offense to be demoted to 2^nd string workhorse, as I’ve had nothing but issues, with it since I removed it from the main case. 1st it wouldn’t boot, then it when it did boot it took forever to get into windows, and I don’t mean slow like 2 min I mean 7-9 minutes per boot. I notice the case wasn’t really sounded like it had a whole lot of juice so I pulled some older SIMMS off the board and it seemed to boot up a a bit faster, but still taking 4-5 minutes to load windows. After a bit more theorizing, I decided that the lack of ambient sound coming from the case could possible mean there wasn’t enough juice to push 3 hard drives, and burner and the floppy, So I pulled a drive and things seemed to be working okay with the lack of one drive. Now at that point it seemed clear the power supply wasn’t pushing enough power through the system and that I’d have to get another to replace it, problem solved….not.��

I get home the other night with a new case, with a 300-watt power supply, as it turns out the other one only had 125 watts, and the price for a power supply was the same as the case with a power supply so I figured I’d kill 2 birds with one stone. I’d simply put the old 450Mhz in the new case and then use the older 125-watt case to power the 200Mhz system. Now by all means this was a well rounded plan no matter how complicated it would be swapping parts left and right and keep track of what card went where and what drive went on what channel, that was no problem. The problem came when I decided I wanted to listen to some music off the 40 gig drive, which happened to be the drive that I disconnected, resulting in the system booting up, no thinking the issues may have been with the drive, I powered off the 1.2 and slapped the drive on. What came next was a horrifying event for multiple reasons. Mainly the fact that the 40 gig drive held the remaining mp3’s and backup files from the last hard drive crash. I powered on the main system and sat and watched the screen detect the drive and then set at the XP boot screen for 7 minutes. I sat and sat and sat and then thought, “HA”, I didn’t set the jumper right, or didn’t set the BIOS right, so I powered down and corrected the jumper, booted up, saw the detection process, saw the XP loading screen, and sat, for 7 minutes. I spent 2hrs rebooting and sitting finally after leaving the room for more than 7 minutes I came in and saw the desktop, thinking to myself, “hey as long as it booted I’m okay, and all I’d have to do is figure out why it was taking so long”, That was until I noticed the drive was not being seen by windows. This was not turning out to be the relaxing Sunday I had imagined, especially since I had to be up by 5 am to go to work now.�

So instead of having 2 down system, I decided to leave the working 1.2 alone and use it if needed to surf the net for spec on the drive. I remember that one of my larger drives was quite twitching about where it sat on the IDE channel and how the jumper was configured, thus I’d simply use the older system to test it with, being as it was easily accessible being completely broken down and open. Of course this was until I had finally transferred the guts from the old case into this new one and it would boot. Once again thinking (K.I.S.S., which means KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID), I flipped the main power switch in the back, all the astounding result of ……….NOTHING! Oh this was not going to be a quiet evening, no this system was waging war and was not going to be defeated as easily as the last time. So 1^st things 1^st get all non-essential out and remount the board, results, nothing. Checked the connection on the board, results, nothing. Checked the outlet, result nothing, as far as technical aspects everything was correct, but obviously it wasn’t. Any other time, I’d be braking out the test lamp to check for conductivity, unfortunately over the years it and all of its replacement have disappeared, to apparently an extended vacation in the Bermuda triangle. Okay now what no test light, how can I check for conductivity? Frustrated to my wits ends it was time to have a set of fresh technical eyes check out the problem. Of course this means Tom, who did all that I did and still no power. Then it hit me! DING!� The 125-watt power supply, It works and if it works then the Remote power switch on the case should turn it on, if all the connection are correct. With the fate of my sanity, on the line, we plugged it in connected the main line to outlet, and hit the button. The ole trooper whirled up to a smooth whir and started blowing a cool jet of air across our hands. The culprit had been found; the case was fine the power supply in it was deader than Elvis.�

Damn, this was the 2^nd piece of faulty I’ve gotten from Fry’s in a row, granted faulty equipment is expected but not like this. So now this is my plan, anything I’m not using that I bought from fry’s is being returned if not today then tomorrow on my day off, this includes the 950Mhz Duron that I had left over from the 1^st incident. Granted I’d like to keep it around, I really don’t feel like taking any chances with it. Now I have to re-transfer everything back to the old case since the power supply is fine and the issues, is with the drive. That happens to be a battle I think, shall be quite interesting.�

In other news, I’ve moved to a morning shift, which is turning out to not be has bad as I thought beyond the being crazy tired for the 1^st half of my day. As I sit here I’m struggling not to look at the clock, as that will only make the day slow down to a crawl, especially since I only have an hr left in the workday. Hopefully by next week I’ll going to bed early enough to actually get some sleep and not freaking out like I did last night though it was only 3 hrs of sleep I kept waking up thinking my alarm was going off, which made sleeping quite difficult getting natural shots of adrenaline every 20-30 min.

I just realized I have another break left so I think I shall sign off now and go enjoy it.

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