I found my home!

[Ray]

ha ha ha ha ha

[abitagirl]

Blah, I forgot to welcome Rotten.

Welcome, Rotten!

[Skul]

Once my PC is up again, I'll be back at full strength.

Update: My PC is working -- albeit at reduced strength -- again.

See, a couple of days ago, I turned on my PC as usual, but instead of the usual 'all-clear' systems check beep, I got nothing. No beeps, no signal on my monitor. The computer was definitely on; all the fans were spinning like usual, including my grahpics card that seems to think it's a whining banshee. Sometimes computers like to pretend they're not working (or is it just all the PCs I've had?) and all it takes is to turn off then on again, so I did that. Didn't do anything. I left it for a day, maybe it was just grumpy.

The next day, I try again. Fans spin, no beep, no monitor signal. I turned my PC off again, unplugged my monitor, plugged it back in, but that didn't do anything. I looked at the back of my PC and thought I saw exposed wiring on a cable, but it was just a bit of dust.

Since I can connect to Internet with my PS3, I read up on the 'no beep' puzzle and found out that means there's a problem with either the power supply or the systems board. Great. I took my computer apart and cleaned out the power supply -- there was quite a bit of dirt and grime in there. Maybe that was blocking the signal, or something. So, cleaned the power supply, put it back in and started my PC. Same story.

The motherboard was fine, no fried circuits or anything. I took each part out, tested, and then put them back in. The power supply, the motherboard, the drives, memory. Then, when I took out the graphics card, guess what? I got a couple of beeps telling me that there was no graphics card. O RLY? YA RLY!

It was booting up and everything. I plugged in an old Voodoo 2 card (yep, I had one of those relics lying around) just to see if there was anything wrong with the slot itself, but there were no problems. It turns out that my card had died and was dragging down my entire system with it! Lousy zombie cards...

I knew this thing was practically dying, anyway. It whined like a bitch when I started the computer, when it got above a certain temperature (usually around 60o C and it heated up FAST), when I it was on standby, or when spinning above 28% speed. Since it was an NVidia 7800 GT, I downloaded nTune and set it so that the fan never went above 28% speed and when playing a game, I set a fan next to it to keep the card cool. Sometimes, the thing whined anyway, but I was glad to be able to get it to shut up for the majority of the time.

I think the main thing that made it whine and heat up so quickly was damage due to power cuts. Two of them. The first time was a couple of years ago. After that, I could only play games for about fifteen minutes before the sound started to rise. I noticed that I could get the card to stay quiet for a whole day if I left the PC on standby for about ten minutes. Didn't always work, but for the majority of the time, it did. Then, when the second power cut happened -- sometime in the middle of summer last year -- it whined whether I left it on standby for ten minutes or two hours. I didn't know it was the graphics card, at first. I thought it was either the hard drives or the power supply. When I found out it was the graphics card and I downloaded nTune and used the fan, everything was... mostly okay. Shouldn't have to have needed to download a program or put a fan next to the card just to stop it from making a noise.

So, I've got a Voodoo 2 card sitting in the 7800 GT's place. It's struggling to run DOOM (not DOOM 3, freaking DOOM! Knee-Deep In the Dead and all that), but at least it's up and running. I'm keeping myself entertained on my PC with Mega Drive and SNES Emulators, so it's not all bad.

Well, now I'm back! Those spammer bastards are gonna pay for messing up my forum!

[Katrin]

Is it me or has the number of board members gone down by 30 since I was last here? A quarter of all the members... gone like that! Then again, the fact they were all spammers may explain it.

I'm just wondering how long it will be before they return...

[Ray]

oh yeah --you're right. I hadn't noticed. Skul must have deleted all the spammers.

[rotten]

Skul and abitagirl, thanks for the welcome. I intend to stick around, you seem like a fun group.

and the name rotten, well, i started that a long time ago, about 94 or so when i first used the internet, i started using that as my name on chat rooms and such. I picked that name after Johnny Rotten, the lead singer of the Sex Pistols. He was such an outsider, and i identified with that. I still do. Someone who wants to buck the system.

Though as fat man mentioned, i was feeling pretty rotten at the moment, i signed up, but thanks to being here, being, able to express my feelings and having your responses, i feel renewed and no longer sad, as i feel like i did the right thing in the situation.