It’s all fixed.
HELLO.
Let me tell you about some good news. Now, you remember the headaches and heartaches I had when it came to the hard drives in Beastbits, and its other issues such as random crashing?
Weeeeeeel, it turned out to be the power supply gone to shit. Whist dropping me off or picking me up from somewhere the other day, he remembered about the power supply in an old machine that we’d got given to “recycle”. Could it be of any use? Hell, it was worth a go.
So, to cut a short story shorter, the PSU was removed, and slapped into Beastbits. And whaddya know? it worked. The voltages in the BIOS looked promising, which is always a good start. I’d always noticed that while these problems were going on, the voltage in the BIOS was suspiciously low. But still, it never worried me. Surely, if it was an undervoltage problem, the machine wouldn’t work at all. Clearly, I was wrong with that.
First thing I noticed is that the video card fan didn’t scream like a skinned child in a bucket of salt. I even had to stick my finger in it to make sure it was still going. It was.
The CPU fan itself must have also improved. The side of the heatsink could be touched. Before it was too warm to touch. I even slapped a CPU intensive java app on for a bit to see what happened. Not a peep, not a whistle, not a blue screen in sight.
Therefore it MUST have been the power supply. All of these months I’ve been blaming crap hard drives, faulty cables and general bad luck, the culprit turned out to be the power supply. Arrrrgh.
So, although this “new” power supply was literally going spare, I thought that the only way to fix it was to replace the power supply for a brand new one. Off I toddle to Ebuyer. I noticed that they had a special on blank DVDs, and DVD/CD wallets (the large type), so I slapped some of those in the order too.
I ordered it on Friday, and paid for delivery on Wednesday, the first day I was off work. Amusingly, it was also dispatched on Friday, and arrived at Mercuryvapour Towers this morning, at approximately 9:25:48, give or take a second.
I returned home, and unwrapped the power supply like a kid at Christmas. It was going to feel weird having old Beastbits back inservice after so many months of relying on the laptop.
I ran upstairs, and back down again, clutching Beastbits in my arms. I laid it gently on the floor, and began unscrewing the temporarly power supply. After a nightmare disconnecting the lead to the motherboard, I began to piece the connectors together. This is the first power supply I’ve had which has its own SATA connectors. All of the rest have been molex connectors, with SATA power connectors plugged into them. It also had something I hadn’t seen before. A slightly longer (by 4 pins) motherboard power connector. Oh noes! this means tht it didn’t actually fit. The extra 4 pins overlapped the IDE socket. Disaster!
I was about to sling the whole lot in the bin. That was,until I realised the extra 4 pins on the power connector actually detatched! Hilarity!
I could now connect it, and all of my drives in a flash. Within minutes, I was running back upstairs, once again, clutching beastbits lovingly. In went the mains cord, the LAN cable, monitor, etc. On went the power, and fhoomph, it once again had life!
I hope this concludes what has been a shitty period in my computing history. I almost lost hundreds of gigabytes of data. You can all come out of the woodwork. I’m hopefully finished talking about computers for a bit.
EDIT: To the persion who’s just searched for “what colour were pickled onion monster munch packets in the eighties” and reached this site, they were purple. The moster was orange with one eye.
