Yet Another Journal

Nostalgia, DVDs, old movies, television, OTR, fandom, good news and bad, picks, pans,
cute budgie stories, cute terrier stories, and anything else I can think of.

Contact me at theyoungfamily (at) earthlink (dot) net
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» Wednesday, May 26, 2010

It's Dead, Jim

The desktop is truly dead. James stopped at MicroCenter on the way home yesterday and bought a new video card, on the off chance that the problem was video-based. (Ironically, he stopped at MicroCenter, waited in line, and still got home before I did...traffic was just freaky yesterday.) After supper he tried the video card, but it did not trigger the monitor.

He tried two other things: he pulled out the memory, and then the sound card. He said either one of these being missing should have made the computer give a series of beeps when it started up. I thought this was odd because this setup has never done a "post" beep when starting, but he said the computer would alert us to those components being missing. Not a sound out of it.

Well, now I have a choice: I can have James build me a new one, or there are two desktop units at MicroCenter already built for a reasonable price. But they come with Windows7, which I am not adverse to as I would be if it was Vista, but I am worried about my considerable software collection not working in Win7. It would actually be cheaper to buy an OEM version of WinXP and have that installed than to buy new software. Plus WinXP works fine for me; I don't see the need to upgrade.

MicroCenter also has a deal right now with two different processors: if you buy them you get a motherboard free. James investigated both last night and said they are comparable with (and perhaps better than) what I have now, and will fit the same memory. So it might actually be less work for him to assemble than last time when we had to buy everything new.

So today I am working on the laptop, which is not as bad as I feared, although I had some brief trouble logging on, and working through a new pile of purchase orders while listening to podcasts ("This Week in Tech," "Podshock" [a Doctor Who, reacting to "The End of Time" part 2], and another "Tech Guy" with Leo LaPorte.).