I just fired up my laptop to say...

[ColinJ]

Okay... My new 1 GB of RAM is working fine now.

The graphics card-induced power loss obviously screwed some important system file because I get the BSOD every time I try and boot Windows normally, but it runs okay in Safe Mode.

Of course, I'd forgotten to install the Windows Recovery Console... My system recovery disks are not proper Windows disks but just the OEM disks. I don't want to use them because that would twat my hard drive back to 2001!

I'm going to try and create a bootable flash drive and install Recovery Console on that. There are loads of articles online describing how to do it. If that fails, I'll restore my hard drive from a backup I did a couple of weeks ago.

After that, I'll flash my BIOS to the latest version and see if that lets me use one of my 256 MB DIMMs in the 3rd (middle) slot.

And after all of that is done, I can get on with what I wanted to do yesterday morning!

 

[ColinJ]

This is becoming a bit of a soap opera!

I gave up on the USB flash drive idea and started to restore my last backup. It all seemed to be going swimmingly well until the progress bar froze and the Estimated Time Remaining indicator stopped counting down and started counting up!

The drive lights for the internal hard drive and the external backup drive are still flickering but nothing much seems to be happening. Oops, the progress bar just juddered and now... the counter is going up again!

I think I should stop worrying about it. I should go and do something else for an hour or two!

 

[Night Train]

Could be your power supply unit has died...

Possible but it does seem to be powering stuff. I suspect the mother board again. I've had to change both before so I may just write it off now and invest in a new laptop.

Sorry for the hijack Colin.

 

[ColinJ]

This is doing my head in!

I went off for a while. I came back and the restoration of the backup had finally completed, apparently successfully. I rebooted the PC and windows came up looking just as it did when I did the backup 3 weeks ago - hooray!

Then Windows announced that it had found new hardware and was installing drivers for it. Strange... the troublesome graphics card was no longer plugged in.

The only hardware change was the new DIMMs which had been detected and memory-checked and were apparently working okay.

What new hardware? Windows announced that the new drivers had been installed and it now needed to be rebooted. Okay...

It started to reboot, then the power went down and it tried again. No joy - I can't even boot in Safe Mode now.

Back to the plan to make a bootable USB flash drive. (I can't burn CDs now that the tower is out of action.)

 

[ColinJ]

Possible but it does seem to be powering stuff. I suspect the mother board again. I've had to change both before so I may just write it off now and invest in a new laptop.

Sorry for the hijack Colin.

Don't worry about that - it gives me something to read between bouts of head-against-wall-banging!

 

[ColinJ]

I'm going to carry on documenting this struggle in case it might be useful to anyone else on t'interweb suffering from any of these kinds of problems!

I've managed to get Safe Mode working again. I did it by changing a couple of Bios settings. One of them was Power Management which kind of makes sense in that the Power management system can shut down the PC when it wants to! Maybe the power dip thing was caused by that. I fiddled with it when I had the memory problems yesterday, whereas I now know that the memory problem was actually caused by a bug in the BIOS which stops the DIMM slots working properly.

Flipping heck - how stupid is this- I've just got Windows booting again! Guess what I did?

The precarious position I have the PC tower balanced in meant that I couldn't have the backup drive and my router's ethernet cable plugged in at the same time (the drive has short leads so I had to move the PC to balance the drive on the bookshelf, the ethernet cable is also short and then it wouldn't reach).

After restoring the backup and booting Windows, I wanted to check that I could access the internet so I powered the PC down, unplugged the backup drive, pushed the tower back so the ethernet cable would reach and plugged that back in.

Windows boot was stalling at eubakup.sys which turns out to be a driver loaded by the backup software (EaseUS to-do-backup). It looks as though it didn't like the backup drive not being there! How crap is that - it's a portable drive so it won't always be there. I'll have to try booting again with it unplugged to see if I'm right.

I've rerouted the router cable (pun in there somewhere?) and now have both backup drive and ethernet plugged in at the same time. Windows is working, the internet is working. Ooh, Windows updates being downloaded, done, now rebooting... (holds breath)... Houston, we have updated Windows!

I'm off downstairs to watch Narc in a minute so I might do a full virus scan to really stress the system (and check for nasties!).

As for flashing the BIOS... I might leave it for a day or two to check that the system really is stable. I don't want that failing halfway!

More exciting ColinJ PC news tomorrow...

 

[Bokonon]

PC new in 2001? That's positively modern. My PC at work was built in 1999!

I've PM'd you Colin.

 

[Dan B]

if you suspect the memory, get Memtest86+ on it - far far more comprehensive than almost anything else you can reasonably do to stress memory. Leave it running overnight

Mixing dimms of different memory sizes is often a source of problems

My current box won't run all four dimm slots without a small increase from defaults to the northbridge voltage and dram voltage

I hate hardware. Why can't it just work?

 

[ColinJ]

if you suspect the memory, get Memtest86+ on it - far far more comprehensive than almost anything else you can reasonably do to stress memory. Leave it running overnight

Mixing dimms of different memory sizes is often a source of problems

My current box won't run all four dimm slots without a small increase from defaults to the northbridge voltage and dram voltage

I hate hardware. Why can't it just work?

The extended Memory test sounds like a good idea. I'll do that.

I want to mix an old 256 MB DIMM with the 2 new 512 MB ones. The BIOS update is supposed to make it possible. I'll give it a go.

I spotted the voltage adjustment in the BIOS but decided not to mess with it. I'll investigate that if I have problems with the 3rd DIMM.

This old PC has been 100% reliable apart from 1 hard drive dying on me and it has done everything I wanted it to do. The only reason I'm messing with it now is to try and extend its life another year until I can afford The Beast!

The PC ran a full virus scan last night with no problems. It hasn't rebooted itself again and I'm using it now. I'll run it for a day or two before doing the BIOS update.

 

[ColinJ]

PC new in 2001? That's positively modern. My PC at work was built in 1999!

I've PM'd you Colin.

It's amazing how fast technology has moved on. My mate bought what was then a s**t-hot Dell laptop for over £2k in the year 2000. 6 years later, he sold it to me for £100. 2 years after that, it wasn't really worth selling so I lent it to a friend. I've just got it back and will use it to play with Linux. 10 years to go from amazing new technology to a pile of old junk! It weighs over 10 pounds without the battery charger!

My ex reminded me that 20 years ago I described to her what the technology of the future would be capable of. You'd be able to buy a small gadget which could be used for showing video clips, taking photographs, making phone calls, playing games on etc. She thought I was bonkers, but I'd actually foreseen the smartphone!


If you extrapolate 20 years from now, what will technology be doing then? It's a bit scary how powerful it will be!

I've PM'd you back Will.

 

[ian turner]

Possible but it does seem to be powering stuff. I suspect the mother board again. I've had to change both before so I may just write it off now and invest in a new laptop.

Sorry for the hijack Colin.

Er it may be powering stuff but there are 3 rails in the psu, 5v,12v and 3.3v and usually it's just one that dies leaving some of the system running while the PC isn't booting.

 

[ian turner]

One of my requirements when I bought my last motherboard was that it should survive a failed bios update.

 

[HLaB]

Glad you got sorted Colin; computers can be funny things as you've found out. When I bought my PC (I think it was 2001 too); I set it up in one corner of the room everything was working but decide I preferred it in the other corner. Un plugged it and wheeled it over to the other side of the room. When I was setting it up I realised it would be better if I moved the usb keyboard to its other slot. I then booted it up to be faced with a constant boot up shut down procedure. I took the keyboard out and re-plugged in the original slot and everything was fine; I've subsequently used both usb slots 100 of times; go figure

 

[ColinJ]

One of my requirements when I bought my last motherboard was that it should survive a failed bios update.

It doesn't seem much to ask does it - a very tiny part of the BIOS whose only job is to control BIOS updating! That area would have to be bombproof because it itself could never be updated (for obvious reasons). If updating the main BIOS area failed then you could just try again.

Glad you got sorted Colin; computers can be funny things as you've found out. When I bought my PC (I think it was 2001 too); I set it up in one corner of the room everything was working but decide I preferred it in the other corner. Un plugged it and wheeled it over to the other side of the room. When I was setting it up I realised it would be better if I moved the usb keyboard to its other slot. I then booted it up to be faced with a constant boot up shut down procedure. I took the keyboard out and re-plugged in the original slot and everything was fine; I've subsequently used both usb slots 100 of times; go figure

When I was trying to work out what was going on with my system I read about one man who could not get his system to boot into Safe Mode until he unplugged his mouse from the PS/2 port, took the adapter off it and plugged it into a USB port!

Speaking of booting and USB ports... My system doesn't seem to support booting from USB. It's a nuisance because I don't have a CD writer or a floppy drive for my laptop so I can't produce disks with diagnostic or repair software on when the tower is kaput.

I created a bootable USB flash drive with Memtest86+ on it but it won't work on my tower PC. I don't think that the BIOS updates will help.

I'd better get Recovery Console set up now while the system is working!

 

[ian turner]

It's 10 years old !!!!! USB booting is slightly more recent.