Why I cannot build my own PC [nerdy]

[vin_petrol]

For nerds only, a rambling account of why I can never build my own PC without it all going horribly wrong.



The thing is, you can build or upgrade your own PC with no problems whatsoever. Sadly, there is some fundamental law of the universe that means I cannot do this.

You can whip out your old CD-ROM drive and replace it with a new one with precisely zero hassles. I will get "CD-ROM Drive Not Found" errors immediately, and then I will discover that my new CD-ROM drive is incompatible with my motherboard/CPU/keyboard/hard disk LED/whatever.

Two years ago resyk braved the Vincent "world of tech that doesn't work" and built me a PC. I thought that if someone else did it the demons wouldn't bite. They did, but to a lesser degree.

Now, one feature of this PC that Resyk built was that it had an Asus motherboard. On this particular board was something that needed cooling. It was not the CPU. I think it was something to do with the graphics. So, Asus put a small fan on this that they obviously spent all of 3p on. So the CPU had a huge Thermo Engine cooler on it, and the fans in the case and power supply were also industrial strength. Sadly, this motherboard cooler was akin to one of those cheap plastic things you buy to cool your face with.

After about eight months something started to whine in that "drive you insane so you kill people" kind of way. I took the machine to bits and traced the noise to this fan. I tried to get another fan: no dice, buying a new motherboard seemed to be the only way to do this. So, direct action was needed. I sprayed WD40 into the bearings. Success! No killer whine. I had to do this again eight months later. Then finally, a few weeks ago, I needed to do it again.

Recently, it was time to spray the fan again. Whilst the case was open, I noticed it was very full of dust. So, I vacuumed it too. I then applied power, to discover the machine would not boot up. Bummers!

Discussion with local PC experts (resyk and road_runner) suggested that a tiny fleck of WD40 had perhaps come off the fan, and was causing a short on the motherboard somewhere. Unless I could locate this short the motherboard was doomed! I tried cleaning it carefully but couldn't get it to work.

So, it was new motherboard time. Now, when you upgrade one PC component it's suddenly time to upgrade several more. So, if it was getting a new mobo it was time for a new CPU and RAM as well. A 2.4 GHz Pentium plus motherboard was sourced. Resyk very kindly agreed to put it together whilst I was at Whitby Goth Weekend. So I left, hoping to return to a working machine.

Only I didn't. The curse was still active. Resyk thinks it's actually my house that is cursed. Upgrading tech is a strangely difficult task there. I think he may be right. Resyk had a significant problem - he simply couldn't get the machine to boot up. It would light up an LED on the mobo but go no further. So, it was off to Google for Resyk. When I got back on Monday he came round with some ideas about what to try. We had the machine in bits with pretty much nothing connected. The plan was to slowly connect things up till we could at least boot so that something appeared on the monitor. We couldn't even get to a BIOS config screen at this point.

As we worked on the machine we noticed that the problems were slightly intermittent. And then we noticed that the wires that connect the power switch to the mobo seemed to be involved. When we looked closely at these wires we realised that the connector was shot. Yup, my problems were nothing to do with an expensive mobo, but the 1p connector at the end of the wire that tells my computer it has been switched on! I can only assume I must have nudged it when hoovering the innards of the PC, stopping it working.

We finally managed to boot the machine as far as the BIOS, so we were able to tell it what sort of CPU was there. We then got as far as "no HDs are connected". At this point Resyk declared that the remainder was easy, and he would leave me to it. I agreed. What could go wrong now?

Last night I finally got round to connecting everything up.

I run Windows 98 on my PC. It's old, but it doesn't second guess me the way later versions of Windows do. Windows keeps getting 'improved' for the less techy user. This is OK, but what Windows really needs is a "look, I know what I'm doing" option that stops it being all "what do you want to do today, happy shiny user?"

The following video clip sums me up perfectly:

http://www.salmondays.tv/downloads/paper_clip.mpg

(caution - lots of swearing)

When I got the HD with the Windows boot disk on it connected up I started to get "While initializing device NDIS. Windows Protection Error. You need to restart your computer." Oh dear. Off to Google. Seems that NDIS in Windows 98 does not support CPUs faster than 2.1 GHz. Bummers! Plus, M$ don't really want to distribute the fix 'cos they don't want people to use W98 any more. Fortunately, someone had put the fix on the web, so I was able to download it to my backup machine, a little Sony Vaio.

Now I had a problem. How to get the fix from my Vaio to my main PC. My Vaio doesn't have a floppy drive. I can get my main PC booted into Safe Mode, but the CD-ROM doesn't work in this mode, and I can't get an Internet connection either (Dial Up Networking doesn't seem to work).

Fortunately, road_runner came to the rescue. He has lots of PCs, and one of them had a floppy drive. So he was able to download the patch himself and write it to a floppy for me. I got the floppy, patched W98, and was then able to reboot into full, proper, am I glad to see you Windows 98.

So here I am. Back with my full desktop PC. I've fired up Kazaa already :-)

Which leaves me with a spare mobo, CPU, RAM and power supply. Looks like I need to build that Linux box I keep saying I will!

Comments

[road-runner.livejournal.com]

But you ended up with a working machine! That's the way it goes. Things don't work first time, you just have to persevere.

Thing is, now both you and everild have better PCs than me. How can that be right?

[vin_petrol]

Things don't work first time, you just have to persevere.

I think I've picked up a meme from those around me that things do work first time for other people. What I now suspect is the case is that other people are more tolerant of things not working than I am!

What I think I need to do is to ensure that I have at least two reasonable computers at any one time. Then, if one is broken I can always use the other. The Vaio pretty much fulfilled this role over the last few weeks. Its significant failing was that the keyboard was too small for the kind of touch typing I am capable of these days. That was something new to me I wouldn't have realised before I lost the main machine.

rant

[resyk.livejournal.com]

The real arse with upgrading is that one clearly wants the latest stuff, but this inevitably means buying a 'first run' for a particular mobo, and hence you immediately discover all of the interesting incompatibilities that then get ironed out over a period of months. Many bios updates, patches etc later and you will end up with a reasonable machine, but that initial period can be painful. I've been through this a few times now. I think you got off quite lightly actually vince - two evenings with fairly good progress during each. I spent weeks and weeks struggling with a PC that would freeze or crash every 10 minutes, and even now my 1Ghz chip is permanently clocked back to 750Mhz and the clever 4xAGP is turned off to keep it stable.

Software companies can be even worse, particularly with Games, as they 'test by release' knowing full well that a 50Mb patch will be required a month after the game has been released. Take Championship Manager 4 for example, released with an army of dreadful bugs and issues - 2 weeks after release, its third Patch is due soon.. hopeless really.

Re: rant

[vin_petrol]

Interesting aspects of upgrading there Robin. I note you didn't mention that before I bought that new stuff :-)

You're right about the game upgrades though. Civ III was significantly tweaked after launch. Sometimes I don't mind it. If it's fixing a significant bug, then you think "why wasn't that caught in testing?", but sometimes the problems are more subtle. A lot of Civ players found the corruption rules in Civ III very problematic, but not in a way that enhanced gameplay. It was just plain annoying. There were lots of complaints, and the game was patched to tweak this problem (to an extent - when I was last playing it still wasn't right as far as I was concerned). However, I can see that it took a lot of serious Civ players playing a lot of games to really highlight how annoying this was.

Re: rant

[resyk.livejournal.com]

Championship Manager 4, was released with a bug in it that would randomly change the scores mid-match, not often but perhaps 2 or 3 times a season. The forums were full of very upset footy nerds and tech supps denying such a bug existed. How can testing not have picked this up?? Being 2-0 up, I remember making a substitution, then noticing that I was inexplicably 3-1 down. Eventually some guy emailed his saved games pre and post a change (2 files of 10 Mb each) and they suddenly admitted to it.

Also - the UI was dreadful, a list of 200 players would take 4 or 5 seconds to Sort. The many patches are slowly sorting things, but effectively the Users have paid for a beta product, and have done all the testing for free.

If it weren't such an excellent game I would have taken it back.

[minusbat.livejournal.com]

I dont suppose you really want me to tell you quite how easy it
is to pick up a new fan for an Aseus motherboard do you ?

If it s any comfort I had a similar problem last time I did an
upgrade - but it turned out to be a bad batch of
motherboards (I got through 4 and ended up switching
to ABit).

I am now in the happy situation of being unable to upgrade
my machine ever again as I require an ISA slot and nobody
makes moptherboards with ISA on them anymore.

BTW, why dont you run something other than Win98 ? Thats
one of the few OS'es I refuse to run (along with Linux).

[vin_petrol]

I dont suppose you really want me to tell you quite how easy it
is to pick up a new fan for an Aseus motherboard do you ?

Not now, now!

BTW, why dont you run something other than Win98 ? Thats
one of the few OS'es I refuse to run (along with Linux).

Simplistically:

1) the more recent a M$ O/S gets, the more it annoys me. All that "My Little Computer" stuff, etc.
2) When I got the machine, IIRC Windows Me and Windows 2000 were considered 'sucky' and not good for 3D gaming (although I now don't really do the latter so that's no longer a big deal).

To be honest, I was happy with W95. It reminded me so much of System 7 on the Mac :-) However, certain essential services (i.e. USB) are not really supported in W95, so 98 it is.

Why don't you like 98?

[minusbat.livejournal.com]

It seems to fall apart after a while. NT was much more stable,
and 2000 (with all the serrvice packs) was pretty good. On
the only Windows box we have I actually am running XP Pro though.

It was the software rot effect that mmakes me dislike the 95/98
thing - the fact that it just seems to degrade after a while
as you use it. Given a fewmonths its doing odd things and
eventually requires a re-8install. I may have to goo back to running
98 on my tiny tocuhs creen laptop (as I am not sure I can bear
all the grief to go thhrough to get 2000 on it with stocuh screen
drivers) but its never been a good experience for me.

I agree about "all those irritrating features" but surely they were
all present in 98 ? You canb switch off the eye candy in XP and
it looks like 2000 if you want.

Win98 is just too basic an operating system - especially for a laptop.
The lack of proper login makes it totally unsuitable for that alone.
Similartly for a home system actually - I like my email to stay moderately
private.

But if all you do is play games on it then its probably O.K.

Of choice i use the PowerBook these days. OSX is the best commercial
OS I;ve ever used. For work I use FreeBSD, and thats the home servers
system too (though with a tiny win2000 partition to run the RAID array
disagnosti software if ever necessary).

TThough I have to say that for organising large folders of pictures
or video clips XP is better than OSX ,merely due to the folder previewing
function (which I dont think OSX has an equivalent too)

[resyk.livejournal.com]

Completely agree with -bat, win98 does slowly crumble to bits over time - the registry gets messed up, the add/remove stuff just doesn't work on 98 and leaves crap all over the place, and a lot of the drivers are rubbish for modern stuff like dvd drives.

I don't think win2K has annoyed me at all really, once you've forced WinExplorer to stop hiding useful stuff from you, there isn't much other hand-holding going on. It has been far more reliable than win98SE ever was.

[vin_petrol]

I'll probably upgrade to a later version of Windows the next time my machine dies then :-)

The installed W98 has been there for two years though, and I've not really found it flakey yet.