My tower PC died! I got it for Christmas in 2001 so I've had my money's worth out of it but I can't afford a new one.
It has been running on only 512 MB of RAM and using onboard graphics. That is fine for general Internet access and the other things I do, but I've started playing about with video and it was struggling so I decided to treat myself to some more memory with my birthday cash. It's old stuff, so it was a stiff £29 for 2 512 MB DDR DIMMs.
As well as that, I scrounged a GeForce graphics card from my nephew's dead PC - his hard drive died on him and he got a fantastic Mac for Christmas so he wasn't bothered about the PC any more!
I was looking forward to using a much snappier PC until I could afford to buy something really powerful for video editing.
While I was waiting for my new DIMMs to arrive, I installed the graphics card. It took a while to sort out drivers for it, and I had reclaimed the 32 MB that the onboard graphics had been using.
Oh, but the HD videos on YouTube still didn't play properly. Turns out that thousands of people have the same problem! It's something to do with the Flash player not the PC hardware. If I download the videos and play them in another player, they work fine.
So the graphics card might have been unnecessary after all. Never mind, it couldn't hurt. Could it...? Actually, it could! My previously stable machine started locking up once a day. Damn.
Then I discovered that the card manufacturer states that a minimum of a 400 W power supply is required. Mine is only 300 W... I toyed with buying a new power supply as well, but hang on - this is exactly why I never spent any money on the PC before. Better to save for a new one. Scrap that idea, I'll take the card out and go back to onboard graphics...
Oh, the postman has been! My DIMMs have arrived. Okay, i can put the DIMMs in at the same time that I take the card out, which is handy because the PC lives tucked out of the way inside an old office desk which I removed the drawers from on one side. It's very neat and fine when I'm not playing about inside the PC, but a damn nuisance when I am! Pull the bookshelf out of the way to gain access to the cabling, unplug it all, pull the tower out of the front of the desk, take the outside off the case, do what I'm doing, put everything back together again...
So what happened next...? You got it, the PC wouldn't boot! I mess about with BIOS settings, reenable the power-on memory test - the PC dies doing it!
So, is it a faulty DIMM? Now I have to take one out at a time and see if the other works. Which would be great if I didn't have to hump furniture about and rewire half my house each time!
I'm having a big mug of tea and trying to calm down. I'll see if one of the DIMMs is okay. Maybe I could use my 2 256 MB DIMMS with that and claim my money back on the other? At least I'd have (1024-32) MB to play with then rather than (512-32) MB.
(Sharp intake of breath...) Right, I'm going in - I may be some time!