Computer Woes

1 PC had screen distortions. Tried many things but couldn't solve the problem. Finally decided to try returning the motherboard for a new one. The person found nothing wrong. Couldn't see my problem.

Frustrated. But my friend offered to help me troubleshoot, as he had more equipment and more spare components at his place. So I lugged the entire system down.

We tried changing the LCD settings. Changing the VGA properties. Pull power from 2 different wall outlets. Tried updating latest drivers (which was quite updated).

Finally, about to give up, I gave it one last shot - Change the VGA cable. I wanted to try that at home, but I had no spare. All the other monitors had non-removable cables.

My friend had to painfully remove his own VGA cable from his nicely done-up desktop. Plugged into my monitor and viola ! Problem Solved !

*smack forehead*

Today, my other working PC just hung all of a sudden. Had to power off. And then it couldn't boot anymore.

Message about "System32\drivers\ntfs.sys cannot be loaded" or something. Damn. Harddisk corrupted ?

Ok. Try Windows Recovery Console. Booted from my CD ROM. Windows setup was installing the necessary components. Then "setupdd.sys cannot be loaded. Setup couldn't continue"

What the F*#( !!!!!

Tried to power off and waited for a couple of minutes, cursing my bad luck when I thought I had a nice P4 upgrade for a few days.

Tried many times. Boot to Safe Mode, Boot from CD Rom, Boot from Floppy Disk. Basically I just cannot get anything working !

Maybe power supply is too weak. I removed the power to one of the CD ROM, and removed the power to a chassis fan my good friend had given to me.

Still no luck.

I was cursing the motherboard's mother's pungent genitals.

Used another computer to start searching the web, pondering whether it was the CPU that was faulty.

Trying to decide which motherboard to get, whether I should get a new CPU and RAM as well.

Needed to open the CPU to see which P4 Chip I had.

More curses and threatening to send the computer to IT Hell, where all naughty equipment get stuck in endless power-boot cycle for eternity. Where they regret not serving mankind to their best abilties.

I finally plugged in the CPU and decided to try one more time.

Booting from CD Worked ! I rebooted, without reinstalling anything, just to see if Windows will start.

It got past the error and Windows Logo came up. Then it died again.
Tried to boot from CD again. Failed at the same place.

This time, I got an inspiration - RAM !

I took out the 2 strips of 256MB and plugged them in again, making sure everything is held tight.

I powered on - viola ! PC booted up without problems.
Now I am typing this entry.

You see, even equipment needs to be threatened with vulgarity, retrenchment and religion for them to know their rightful place in the food chain.