When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. Right? Unfortunately I don’t care for lemonade, especially when I’m trying to swim in it. Ah, life does not seem to like me much right now. I have been extremely sick the last couple of weeks, and have spent most of my time sleeping. Even so, I still feel like I haven’t slept while I write this (so forgive the numerous errors.)
Now, back to my Sempron. After only running for a week or two, it decided it no longer liked me. While I was doing some critical programming work that I had been delaying until I could get that computer up and running, my computer randomly started making racket. I had the hard drive freeze and start making a more concerning clacking two days before, but the noise still had me worried because I couldn’t really back-up what I had done at the time. After messing around a little, I decided that it was probably not the hard drive, but a fan. Even so, I decided to hibernate (with the important programming still open,) praying that I could get back my work.
I continued, one by one, to test every fan in sight. After determining that none of those fans were giving issue and that the problem seemed to be in the power supply, I proceeded to call my brother, who had built the machine. After confirming with him that I had indeed checked all the fans, I let him get his hands on it as I was on my way out the door. I got back to find that he had discovered that it was the secondary power supply fan; the one hidden from my vision and neither of us had known it existed. He proceeded to clean not only the ailing fan, but the entire dust-bucket computer to get it to quiet down.
I got the machine back into its proper place and started to plug all of its components back in (which my brother gladly unplugged uselessly, but didn’t feel like putting back.) After getting the POS back together, I proceeded to attempt a boot back into the still-hibernated XP. As my luck stands, it failed and decided the only course of action was to delete the hibernation file and reboot, straight into a DLL failure. After several variations of this, I grabbed a Bart-PE CD (great little tool for debugging and messing around, similar to the trusty Linux live-CD.) After that failing, burning a fresh XP CD for repair, and having that fail on two different CD-roms, I decided my problem was not with the OS.
Then I noticed that my brother had been right about having 512mb RAM in the computer to start with. I had moved the RAM from the Dell into the Sempron to help speed it up, and I thought I had been reading only 512mb in it, but now I had 768mb reading in the BIOS. I continued to remove the Dell’s stick and booted into Windows with no further issue. Probably explains the issues with the Dell…
I ended up with two days wasted, my programming lost, and a dead RAM stick. Now today, my battery back-up blew up (literally, it lost a capacitor) and the site says it’s out of warranty even though I’m only a year into its three year warranty. Here’s hoping I can find the receipt, which I probably burned somewhere along the line…
