Back from such a long absense. Or at least it feels like it. I spent the last week without my main computer “asdf” after a capacitor on the motherboard decided to blow and leave it’s curry smelling goo all down the side of the board. Needless to say it didn’t really work after that.
Bought a new nForce-based board. Loverly new thing that can accept Sempron/Athlons and my trusty old Duron. Brought it back home, whacked the board on a bit of cardboard, plugged in the CPU, memory, PSU, keyboard and graphics card and touched the pins to make it boot. Screen just sits there in standby. Swap out all the components and keep trying to no avail. Think bugger this it’s late we’ll take it back to MD in the morning. So we do. We go up to their lab and Alan plugs it in and straight away it boots. Odd we think. So we go back home and get all the bits so that we can test what isn’t working for us. Go through them all and find that they all work.
Out of desperation to find why it wouldn’t work for us Alex asks to swap the keyboard. And there was the error. Because their keyboard was going through a KVM switch in the lab it was working fine. But it turns out that the board would only work with certain keyboards through it’s own keyboard controller. Tried another of the MSI boards and found it was the same on that, so I just got a different MSI model which is a bit worse but at least the keyboard works now. Also, there is the bonus that I now have a working computer.
Yesterday was one of them fun filled “Driver installation” days. If only I actually kept all my driver disks in the aptly named “Drivers” box. *sigh*
Just got re-install all the programs and all the fun that goes with that now.
It did go to show how long it is since I actually built a computer and how much the motherboard has changed in the two-ish years. 12V socket!?
Also you may want to know. I was on Century FM the other night! And not just reporting traffic, I actually spoke to Helen and Shirley-Ann. That was odd, unarranged and cool at the same time.
On the theme of Century, just noticed on their site that good ol’ Eddie has his pic up in their gallery. Excellent bloke.
and as you watch me crawl, you stand for more
B
