Posted by Kromey at 2:10am Mar 1 '09I swear, I'm about ready to swear off every building a computer again - it seems like every time I do something goes horribly wrong and I spend hours upon days upon weeks trying to figure the damn thing out!
4 months ago I bought the parts to build a gaming machine for [private], with the intention that it would be run upon the HDTV in the living room and pull double-duty as the HTPC as well.
When I put it all together, it no worky. Fine, I can deal with this, I'll just troubleshoot until I find the culprit. First step: Unplug all non-essential hardware, leaving only RAM and CPU. Does it POST? No. Okay, pull the RAM - POST? No. Pull the CPU - POST? No. Okay, bad motherboard then, but I've lost the receipt so the store I bought it from won't take it back (they never take returns anyway, but I know the right people so I'm afforded certain perks - with limitations) nor can I RMA it to the manufacturer. Fine, whatever, I'll soak up the loss and just buy a new motherboard.
Fast forward to today, where I've finally gotten a new motherboard and I'm putting the computer together again. No POST. Hit the reset button - POST, followed by a "No mouse detected" error (WTF? Never seen a BIOS care about there being a mouse before!), but I can hit neither "Del" (to enter Setup) nor "F1" (to ignore the error and continue) because it's locked up. Okay, hit reset again, no POST. WTF?
3 or 4 hours of troubleshooting later, I have either a second consecutive DOA motherboard, or the PSU is bogus. I have not a way to show that one way or the other. Hell, for all I know I could still be way off! So I'm either gonna tackle more troubleshooting later (after a good night's rest) or I'm just gonna swallow my pride and take the damn thing to the local computer shop and have them figure out what's wrong.
I fucking hate computers some times.
4 months ago I bought the parts to build a gaming machine for [private], with the intention that it would be run upon the HDTV in the living room and pull double-duty as the HTPC as well.
When I put it all together, it no worky. Fine, I can deal with this, I'll just troubleshoot until I find the culprit. First step: Unplug all non-essential hardware, leaving only RAM and CPU. Does it POST? No. Okay, pull the RAM - POST? No. Pull the CPU - POST? No. Okay, bad motherboard then, but I've lost the receipt so the store I bought it from won't take it back (they never take returns anyway, but I know the right people so I'm afforded certain perks - with limitations) nor can I RMA it to the manufacturer. Fine, whatever, I'll soak up the loss and just buy a new motherboard.
Fast forward to today, where I've finally gotten a new motherboard and I'm putting the computer together again. No POST. Hit the reset button - POST, followed by a "No mouse detected" error (WTF? Never seen a BIOS care about there being a mouse before!), but I can hit neither "Del" (to enter Setup) nor "F1" (to ignore the error and continue) because it's locked up. Okay, hit reset again, no POST. WTF?
3 or 4 hours of troubleshooting later, I have either a second consecutive DOA motherboard, or the PSU is bogus. I have not a way to show that one way or the other. Hell, for all I know I could still be way off! So I'm either gonna tackle more troubleshooting later (after a good night's rest) or I'm just gonna swallow my pride and take the damn thing to the local computer shop and have them figure out what's wrong.
I fucking hate computers some times.
Goddammit - Kromey