PC died......

My PC died today. Been limping along on a single memory module (out of four) for the past week. My flat screen monitor died too. I think someone put a voodoo curse on me.

Anyway, any emails sent to me are on that computer and beyond reach. I think it's either a motherboard or power supply (or both) issue, so I will be getting those messages back when my system returns. Hopefully, anyway.

Luckily I still have my older system here and it works OK even after being ignored for close to two years. Not as peppy as the newer one, but at least it is chugging along.

Damned computers........

Are you lucky enough that it could only be the PSU?

My HD crashed back in July and a friend of mine's failed the same day your PC died. Of course, with me being a PC tech and ignoring the warning signs that began a whole year beforehand, I got what I asked for. Usually the way it goes, right?

Best wishes for recovery!

Hang in there!
Mike

Fortunately I got the optional three year warranty when I bought the thing, and it's only two years old. I have external USB backup drives on the system, so all the data should be safe.

It's just another headache that I would rather have not had. What's the odds that my flat screen monitor would have died at the same time? That was bought separately and is NOT covered under the warranty.

It seems like I go through periods where EVERYTHING seems to be breaking and failing around me. Probably just a sign of the times where "quality" control doesn't really mean much any longer when nearly everything is manufactured either in China or Mexico. It just seems to me that nothing is really made to LAST longer then maybe the warranty period at all.

whats the chances of the surge protector crashing... and thus not letting power to the Monitor or CPU? It does seem wierd that both the monitor and processor would go out at the same time.

I don't think that's what happened. When I was troubleshooting, I yanked out the four memory cards and tested each one individually. It appeared that only one of the four was still good. That really doesn't seem likely, but that's what it looked like. It also appeared that I was not getting a signal to the monitor, and my first guess was the video card had failed. But since it was easier to hook up another monitor than to swap around video cards, I tried that first. Actually I tried the cable first, but that didn't make a difference. It was definitely the monitor. I tried hooking up the apparently bad monitor to my other system to verify it was the problem, and no, it wouldn't work on my older system either. It's certainly dead.

So I was running on a single memory card (1 gb) and my older monitor for close to a week. Then on Friday, I tried booting up my system in the morning, and after about 30 seconds of so, the entire system would just shut down flat. Several tries got the same response. This happened about a year ago and it turned out to be the liquid cooling system pump had failed, so the processor would shut down as soon as it got hot. At least that is what the techs told me. Seems kind of odd that a processor would get THAT hot that quickly. BTW, they also replaced the motherboard as it was showing some problems with the USB ports.

So, no telling what is going on. But I have to buy a new flat screen monitor and send my system back for repair. I have requested an upgraded motherboard and perhaps a quad core processor instead of the current dual core. I may go ahead and upgrade the flat screen monitor to one of the larger 1920x1200 screens, since prices have come down quite a bit on them lately. As for upgrading the processor and motherboard, not only do I figure a minor speed increase might be worthwhile at this time, but I really don't have any confidence in the older model motherboard, and if the processor has been shutting down because it has become overheated, I really don't want that older one put into the new motherboard anyway.

A while back I upgraded my secondary hard drive as I was quickly filling up the 500 gb capacity it had. So I went and bought two 1 tb SATA hard drives and set them up as RAID 0 to give me almost 2 tb of capacity. Unfortunately I picked Seagate drives. One of them failed in about three weeks. Fortunately Best Buy offers a 30 day money back, so I took them back and got Western Digitals. These are running fine so far. My advise would be to just stay away from Seagate drives completely. Not long ago I wanted to get an external backup unit that would be able to handle my entire system so I bought a Seagate 1.5 tb unit. The first one I got failed right off the bat. Trying to backup my system, it would just shut down after a few hours running. I bought another one, and this one ran for about a week before just crapping out completely. Again, went to Western Digital and haven't had a bit of problems with them. I will NEVER by Seagate again!

So, that's what I have been doing in my *spare* time lately....

Have you tried replacing the battery?
2 of our computers were acting wonky so wifey thought she'd do the simplest thing first and replaced the battery, bingo they were up and going again. Same thing happened with a neighbors computer.

It's on it's way to Richmond Virginia right now to be fixed under warranty. A motherboard battery shouldn't deplete it's charge in just two years anyway.

I kind of miss that system right now..... It's been getting a little chilly during the nightime around here, and that sucker generated so much heat that I had to close the den door to keep it from causing the entire house to cool down by affecting the thermostat. The old computer I am using now doesn't even get warm.....

if your memory cards were dying off one by one i'd say you have a bad circut in there or your entire processor is going down. but as far as power shutting down could be due to your power supply module getting hot due to the muffin fan either stopped working or to much dust build up in it. it will manually shut down so that it doesnt burn up the processor. was the power supply module dirty? do you clean it once a month? id clean it atleast once a month with some compressed air in the can. you can pick it up almost any wheres like target,walmart,staples and such. you also have small fans in your monitors (depending on brand and size) that usually get hot also due to dust and such clogging it up and will generally cause the same actions as it would on a cpu. there could be many reasons behind the actions but generally its the most common of not being properly taken apart and cleaned out often. now since you really cant just take your monitor apart and clean it you can use dry air in it just takes more time and harder to get everything out thus still causing it to build up again faster. if your monitor is a flat screen lcd then most likely its fried since its getting no power and ive seen that happen often with the lcd's (liquid crystal display) they are basically like the plasma tvs and have almost as many problems with either frying or the crystals burning up and not displaying anything.

At least your data is safe. Hopefully. My HDD crashed in May, and I couldn't get anything off of it. Not through DOS, not with another computer. It just went kaput!. I lost a full 2 years of snake records, and other data.

I now have a back up USB HDD. I guess I should probably clone my PC HDD some time before I go and have another mishap. LOL

Most of the external USB hard drives come with software to do automated backups of your main hard drive(s). Considering the relatively low cost of these devices, I think everyone should really use them. All it takes is a hard drive crash to really ruin your day.

My system has had the processor, RAM, and motherboard upgraded and is on it's way back to me now. Should be here tomorrow. Of course, NOW I hear that an even newer and faster processor/motherboard is available... But I guess it is better to not be a pioneer with the latest and greatest stuff being released.... I've got enough headaches as it is.

As for the monitor, I found a Hannspree 28 inch (1920x1200) flat screen LCD for a cheaper price then I paid for my original 20 inch flat screen. Got rave reviews all across the board, so I went out to Best Buy and bought one. Looks great with my camcorder hooked up directly through HDMI, so I hope the text screens from my PC look decent. The bigger screen will likely help my tired eyes when they start getting bleary in the early AM hours, I guess.

Yeah, this stuff came with some software, and you can set it to auto back up based on day of week, or daily. I didn't like it though. It tries to take over your system. Serious hang ups, slow loads. Once I uninstalled it, things smoothed back out. But just having that extra ½ TB of back up space makes me feel better. LOL

This Dell 21" LCD has done me pretty well so far. I'll give technology a little more time, and go get an LCD Flat screen TV, about 40 inch or so, and use it for my monitor. They oughta be comparable in price then. LOL

The backup program I have been using is Retrospect Express. I actually had to use the restore function not that long ago when one of the two 1tb Seagate hard drives I got and had in Raid0 died on me. The restore worked flawlessly. Thank goodness. About the only time you ever really test a backup is when you REALLY REALLY need it. And by then you are up the creek without a paddle if you find out it doesn't work as advertised.

Yeah, it seems like most of the PC monitors these days are using HDMI for the interface. Fortunately the signal conversion between DVI to HDMI must be pretty straight forward, since a cable is supplied for that. Otherwise I'd be looking for a new video card that had HDMI output. Which, I imagine, is going to be the next "standard" in PC video protocol.

BTW, if you ever need anything related to cables and such, check out http://www.monoprice.com. They don't try to rape you on the prices of the HDMI cables like a lot of other places will do.

This stuff?
http://www.amazon.com/EMC-Retrospec..._1_2?ie=UTF8&s=software&qid=1226970340&sr=1-2

Might have to look into it if it works well. Glitches disturb me. They mean problems in the matrix. LOL

And thanks for the link. I bookmarked it.

Hmm, odd... I got Retrospect Express with my external hard drives for free. I believe the last two Western Digital 1tb drives I got came with it

Well, that don't surprise me any. I always have to pay for stuff that others get for free. I'm just lucky that way.

They did have a lesser version for $25 bucks, but seemed like the pro version was bit better of a package. I'll do some more looking though. That was the first link I clicked.

Well, my upgraded PC just showed up a few minutes ago. I'll be setting it up this afternoon.

Got a question for anyone who might know the answer, though. This box has a dual gigabit ethernet controller on the motherboard. Would anything be gained by running both ports to my router? If not, what is the purpose for having two ethernet ports?

Hey Rich!
Dual ethernet controllers are basically good for sharing an Internet connection. Ideally between servers or gaming on LAN (large area networks).

Unless you have two Gigabit Ethernet incoming lines (From service provider) you won't gain any transmission speeds by duplexing (using one line for incoming transmissions and another for outgoing transmissions) because it will bottleneck at the single line from provider.

"...what is the purpose for having two ethernet ports?"

Click to expand...

Marketing scheme. Nah, mostly for gamers that play games at LAN parties. Routers aren't needed for them as the controller has router-type functions.

It's been a few years since I've been up on the latest tech stuff so I had to spend a few minutes making sure that things in this area hadn't changed much, and they haven't.

Have fun!
Mike
(HH)

HappyHillbilly said:

Hey Rich!
Dual ethernet controllers are basically good for sharing an Internet connection. Ideally between servers or gaming on LAN (large area networks).

Unless you have two Gigabit Ethernet incoming lines (From service provider) you won't gain any transmission speeds by duplexing (using one line for incoming transmissions and another for outgoing transmissions) because it will bottleneck at the single line from provider.

Marketing scheme. Nah, mostly for gamers that play games at LAN parties. Routers aren't needed for them as the controller has router-type functions.

It's been a few years since I've been up on the latest tech stuff so I had to spend a few minutes making sure that things in this area hadn't changed much, and they haven't.

Have fun!
Mike
(HH)

Click to expand...

Ah, too bad. But I guess it would take an intelligent router to be able to handle dividing the data stream among the two ports. Assuming the bottle neck was at the router to PC connection. I have a really fast connection with Comcast, so that could be possible.

Anyway, except for the video driver mysteriously vanishing on my system, I got it up and running. Got a problem with the audio, though, in that the subwoofer no longer works. Not sure what the cause is at this point, but I think I jinx myself whenever I start thinking about upgrading a component. I killed my older flat screen monitor that way, and now apparently I did it to the audio system as well. I've been using the audio that is on the motherboard, which is pretty decent, but thinking maybe a new Soundblaster card type of bandaid is needed. Connie says I should start thinking about upgrading her so SHE could stop working.... But I told her that I didn't want to have to break-in her replacement...

Anyway, that Hannspree 28 inch monitor is pretty awesome. I was afraid that it would be slow with that many pixels to refresh, but it is quicker than greased lightning. Now this old 20 inch monitor on my older system looks absolutely tiny in comparison. Amazing how quickly you can get spoiled by new technology.

Oh also noticed that this new motherboard/cpu/memory combo is running MUCH MUCH cooler than my old components did. By a HUGE margin. Perhaps that contributed to my problems.....

Oh well, wonder what will break next......

WebSlave said:

Oh also noticed that this new motherboard/cpu/memory combo is running MUCH MUCH cooler than my old components did. By a HUGE margin. Perhaps that contributed to my problems.....

Oh well, wonder what will break next......

Click to expand...

And how do you tell that? I mean short of shooting your PC with a temp gun all the time. LOL Just curious.

I just shot mine with my Raytec AutoPro (couldn't help myself) and hit 107° on the cooling fins over the CPU.

crotalusadamanteus said:

And how do you tell that? I mean short of shooting your PC with a temp gun all the time. LOL Just curious.

I just shot mine with my Raytec AutoPro (couldn't help myself) and hit 107° on the cooling fins over the CPU.

Click to expand...

Well with the old system, my knees would get hot.......

Seriously, I had to put an external fan at the back of the case to blow the hot air away from me. It heated up my whole den........ It's a WORLD of difference between the two....