I was and am having a lot of computer problems the last week or so. First my online Maxtor hard drive went bad. The symptoms of this problem were very subtle.
Event Log in Windows 2000 Professional started indicating severe problems with the hard disk. I could not copy files or play music files and all functions became sluggish.
I guess it was time for the drive to go. I have reformatted it and installed various types of operating systems on it dozens of times. I have hot swapped it, dropped it and in other ways abused it beyond what the average hard drive would go through so I have no complaints (although I will look into the warranty for this drive just to make sure it has expired).
I brought a new 40 gig Western Digital hard drive. It wasn’t a great deal for a hard drive but I was in a bind and needed one as soon as possible. With the mail in rebate the final price is reasonable but the upfront cost was high.
After installing Windows 2000 on the new hard drive I came across a USB card that I forgot I had. It was not like your average PCI slot card. While the computer was running a placed the card close to the motherboard thinking, ‘I wonder what slot this card goes in’. While doing this I accidentally touched a set of jumpers on my motherboard. That was it folks.
My computer immediately went dead. All attempts to get it going again failed. I had fried my board. You have no idea how angry I was at cooking my own board right after paying an up front high price for a hard drive.
I had to get a new mother board now so I went out and got a pretty cheap board that gives me all the capabilities I need at this time (I’m not a gamer- although I do play computer games once in awhile).
This wasn’t the end of my problems though. It seems the burning out of the board had also fried some other components of my system. My nvidia AGP video card was destroyed, my 256 333megahertz memory was cooked (Damn! More expense).
Again I couldn’t wait for good sales or bargains so I had to purchase what I could for the best price I could find at that time.
The video card I purchased cost more than the motherboard. The upfront cost of the 256 2100 DDR memory was higher than the motherboard and almost as expensive as the 256 2700 DDR memory that had burned out.
There are still problems. My CPU is not functioning at full speed and I cannot seem to get it up to speed without my computer hanging. I may have to buy a new chip, which would be another unwanted expense. It’s enough to make one’s ass ach.
I’m still not out of the woods yet because more tweaking, returning, exchanging, and haggling needs to be done before I feel comfortable.