Sennadar Forums

lochar wrote:Trust me, I'm definately going to be well grounded for the next install. I am NOT smoking another processor.

I figured you knew better, but I have seen some perfectly intelligent people do some unbelieveably stupid things when working on their computers before. I wanted to tell them why don't they just go ahead and put on some corderoy pants and a wool sweater then shuffle across a shag rug before grabing that $500 paperweight they are about to create.

A few suggestions (very very basic level):

#1 -- Make sure your motherboard is mounted properly, and nothing is shorting out from contacting something else (i.e you've got the proper standoff pins/pieces in the right places).  

#2 -- Make sure your CPU is mounted in the socket correctly.

#3 -- make sure the Heatsink was installed as per instructions (i.e you have either a thermal transfer pad, or thermal transfer goop)

#4 -- make sure the FAN on the heatsink is plugged in to the correct fan socket (FAN1 or CPUFAN -- some motherboards shut down automaticly if the CPU fan doesn't spin)

#5 -- make sure it's actually getting power. Newer motherboards have lights on them to indicate when they get power, the moment the power-supply is plugged in.

#6 -- make sure the PC Speaker is plugged in to the board correctly, if you're getting beeps, look the beep codes up in the manual.

#7 -- the power-on/off switch (for the front of the case) is plugged into the correct pins on the motherboard, right? Are you sure?

#8 -- If your motherboard has onboard diagnostics display (eg mine has a little two-digit display which shows the current status of the motherboard, plus a few LEDS. Others have an array of LEDs which change)

#9 try a different, more grunty power supply. Newer processors take a fair whack out of the PSU, 300W or higher is a minimum usually.

#10 -- Make sure you're getting power to the board and PSU, (something should light up, blink, flash, spin, hum, smoke, etc when you flick the switch)

#11 -- Remove as much ram, expansion cards, plugged-in-stuff, etc as possible. Remove all the ram entirely and it should cause it to beep. Unplug/remove everything apart from the CPU, RAM, Video Card (unless its onboard), Monitor, and Keyboard. Even hard drives, CDROMs. Including power (incase something weird is going on with the power supply not being able to cope).

#11b -- Borrow/swap the RAM for a known working stick.

#12 -- if it's still not working, dunno!

Spec, did all that.  I'll definatly follow that advice still once I get my new processor in too.

The basic DO's and DONT's have been covered.. so thought I would jsut share a cople of the more interesting ways to lose your sanity while working with computers.

Today's Special Hair tearing fault. 11th Feb

Check the RESET switch. If this switch is damaged or jambed in, it results in the mobo getting power but sitting around like a Dead Donkey. This one took me 2 weeks and the consultation of 4 other people who were ALSO completely clueless, till some wise ass kid figured it out after 30 seconds. I dont think anyone has found his body yet.

More to follow tomorow....

Natasha

LOL, that must have been damn frustrating. I've been in the position of that kid a few times, with other things. Heh, it never gets old, the look on the face of whoever... lol

natasha wrote:Check the RESET switch. If this switch is damaged or jambed in, it results in the mobo getting power but sitting around like a Dead Donkey. This one took me 2 weeks and the consultation of 4 other people who were ALSO completely clueless, till some wise ass kid figured it out after 30 seconds.

Hehehe... I love those sort of things. Not when I'm on the recieving end of the problem, but being able to fix something like that in 30sec is great -- if only for the look on people's faces.

guardian_mike wrote:I've been in the position of that kid a few times, with other things.

hehe, same... I've developed a few applications for work, so I get a few shouts (or wails of utter frustration) for help. At the advice of another techie, I've now got a routine that I wave my hands around like a magician (i need some of that 'puff' explosive powder, and a cape to complete the effect), then tell them to click on the button(whatever) again... 99% of the time it seems to work, and stops them asking questions about why the damn thing is now working. hehe

natasha wrote:Check the RESET switch. If this switch is damaged or jambed in, it results in the mobo getting power but sitting around like a Dead Donkey. This one took me 2 weeks and the consultation of 4 other people who were ALSO completely clueless, till some wise ass kid figured it out after 30 seconds. I dont think anyone has found his body yet.

More to follow tomorow....

Natasha

Works really well when the reset switch isn't even plugged into the board.  Guarenteed to not screw it up.

Hair Tearing problems #2

This is an old one that you probably wont get nowadays but was funny as hell at the time.

Compaq desktops. they have, or had anyways, a built in memmory check that resulted in the mobo shutting down everything and defaulting to an error message saying

"Aterations in memory have been detected. press ALT F10 to accept and continue"

or some such.

Now this dosent sound so bad.....EXCEPT that is that this also shut down the Vidio card. if like most peaople at the time, you had installed a 3D vidio card and were NOT using the mobo's own onboard card.....you were left with a machine that sat there like a dead donkey and no clue what the hell was going on.

I did the "Wise ass kid" routine with this problem a couple of times. Walk in the door and listen to the people moaning about this heap of crud machine that was driving them to drink, walk over and notice what brand it is, hit ALT F10 without letting them see you do it, smack your fist on top of the machines case. and walk away saying "fixed it" as it boots up properly.

I will leave to your imagination the look on the poor SOB's face this results in.

Natasha.

PS. hey why am I the only one posting Hair Tearing problems. I bet we have all come across a few. Share the wealth people.

http://rinkworks.com/stupid/
http://www.userfriendly.org/community_t ... chive.html

Some problems with SSH on Linux.
(There are no 'Hair Tearing Problems', just inconvenience).

1.) I could not log via ssh to one computer. First I thought that it is because of too high security or improperly configured firewall. NFS and Samba worked fine, though. What was the matter? While there were ssh-client package installed, there were no ssh-server... no program to respond to trials to connect via ssh.

2.) On the other machine ssh worked just fine. Both ways. Which did not worked well was scp (secure copy, via ssh). It worked only one way, when the command was issued on mentioned computer. What was the matter? The verbose option in scp shown something unusual in the response to scp in the computer. Reason: some 'clever' trick to change the tone and duration of beep using echo command with escape sequence... without checking if the shell was used interactively (by an user) or non-interactively (e.g. by scp). And scp got confused...

Lochar: any ETA on when backup site (http://sennadar.dontexist.com if I remember correctly) will be up?

shadowhawk wrote:Lochar: any ETA on when backup site (http://sennadar.dontexist.com if I remember correctly) will be up?

I'm supposed to get my parts in the mail tomorrow. Will have it up tomorrow evening if everything goes good. *knocks on wood*

Good luck, Lochar.
<hr>
By the way: Fel, what are your concerns about having jour stories on another web site; in other way what about next backup site (HTML only)? You hold the copyright. Lochar, could you please give me an estimate how much space (MB) takes HTML version of the Tarrin Kael chronicles? All other: would you like new backup site, even if it would be HTML only?

Don't take it as a word that I will make new backup site, though.

shadowhawk wrote:Good luck, Lochar.
<hr>Lochar, could you please give me an estimate how much space (MB) takes HTML version of the Tarrin Kael chronicles? All other: would you like new backup site, even if it would be HTML only?

Thanks for the luck.  Maybe you'll have a treat tonight.  Anyways, I'm not sure about just the HTML part, but all told it's about 38 MB for my site.  If it was under 10, I would have put it up on my cox account. BLEH.

Looking forward to being able to move on with the Pyrosian series...blocked access from the Yahoo groups site here at work, so I'm going through Tarrin withdrawls! lol

Is the backup site still down????


Natas

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your bandwidth.  It's BACKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK!