ScuzzBlog: Diaries December 2020
Entry 19th December 2020: Post 1: PC Fun - Just one of those days.
PC Fun - Just one of those days.
I hadn't intended spending the day on the PC but hey, happens. The
XP machine fell over that I just fixed and I decided I better take
another look. In addition to that, another one of my PCs developed
a graphics issue that had now resulted in me losing half the screen.
First up the XP machine. Try as I might she would not boot. She got
to the same line in the startup and hung. I moved her to the bench
and unhooked as much as I could and carefully put everything back.
Sadly no joy. Just hangs at the same line.
I kinda accepted that the old hard drive I had used had bitten the
dust so went and fetched a couple more out of store. I was in the
process of unscrewing the drives when I noticed I had left a floppy
disk in the machine. The other day I was trying to format a HD disk
as a 720K disk using this line.
FORMAT A: /T:80 /N:9 from the command line.
Didn't work. I was trying to discover why and obviously forgot I
had left the disk in the drive. I removed the disk and she booted
no problem. DUH ! Ok we all make mistakes. Let's move on.
Next problem was a little more tricky. I swapped out the graphics
card which only wanted to show 16 colours and refused to let me
update the driver. It just cycled through the install process. It
even caused the CD to go missing.
Time for overkill, so I pulled a NVIDIA GForce that I had and tried
that. No problem what so ever and was able to install the software
and the drivers.
However, the fan is a little large and so I decided to move the PCI
Ethernet over by one slot. Big mistake. Not only did the machine
try to endlessly loop an install of an unknown device but also lost
all my network settings. I tried everything to get the network up
and running again. No chance.
As a final attempt I simply moved the network card back to its
original slot and that worked a treat. The computer rebooted and
both network card and graphics card were working fine. So in the
end it all worked out, albeit that card is smothering the NVIDIA
fan and it will need swapping out.
I hadn't intended doing either of these projects today. I didn't
need the PCs for any upcoming project so they could have waited.
Instead here I am at 7 'oclock having spent the day sorting them
out. Good fun I guess but I would have preferred to have been on
the Amiga for the day.
It rained an amazing amount today. Buckets and buckets.
PC Fun - Just one of those days.
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