I’m a Dad

I came, I saw, I kicked its …

My PC has been acting up since the day I put the thing together a couple of months ago. The problem was that occasionally, during boot up, it would hang. Drives would spin, fans would whir, lights would flash encouragingly, but no boot up procedure, no floppy scan. It didn’t happen often enough to spur me to find a remedy. At least not until recently. A few weeks ago I started getting hard drive failure errors. I said to myself, “Self, I bet this is the reason you’ve been having all those weird problems – your hard drive was in the process of (as we say in the industry) taking a dump.” I was excited to get the hard drive replaced and fix that silly annoying problem. I got the new hard drive installed about a week or so ago and I almost cried when I realized that it actually made the problem worse!

Now, every time I tried to turn the silly thing on, it would hang. This, of course, was totally unacceptable. I had no idea what might be causing the problem so I took my search for answers to the web. After a fair bit a googling I found a helpful forum Cyber Tech Help. I just checked the link and the forums seem to be down for some reason. Anyway, after posting my problem and then searching the archives (should have searched first, I know) I decided to take the system apart and reinstall all the cards one at a time, starting and restarting after each card.

For the sake of accuracy I should mention here that before I decided to remove and reinstall everything I checked the following:
Installed a different power supply
Updated the motherboard BIOS
Cleared the CMOS, setting it back to factory defaults
Checked, rechecked, and triple checked settings in the BIOS
Played with processor and memory voltages
all to no avail.

So one night when Jen and the baby were out somewhere, I tore my pc apart. I put it back together piece by piece starting out with nothing but the hard drive and floppy drive, then adding the CD, then the other hard drive, then the DVD. It worked like a dream. Then I installed the PCI cards, sound card, usb, firewire, modem. It worked perfectly: started and restarted each time with no hesitation whatsoever. Until I connected the usb devices. I disconnected the devices, it didn’t help. I took the card out and the problem was fixed. After a little playing around I noticed that when the usb card was screwed into the chassis it became partially unseated. I decided the heck with it and just took the piece of junk out. I have several external usb devices though, so I connected a hub and everything works fine.

It’s been working perfectly for over a week now.