What’s Up?

So I couldn’t think of a really good title that describes the recent “technical” problems that have resulted in no new ProReviewer posts for the last couple of weeks

Soon after I finished the post on ClipGuru a couple of weeks ago, as I was about to start on the next post, in fact at just after 5pm Saturday 8th November, we had a local power cut. No idea what caused it but after a few seconds the switchgear somewhere on the main grid automatically tried to reconnect the power twice in succession. No big deal you think, happens 2 or 3 times a year.

bigfoto.com

When the power was eventually restored a little later I found that my server PC wouldn’t start up, my Windows Home Server was dead and my main XP desktop, which I use for all my work and blogging, had some data corruption (or so I thought).

What Next?

Well I started off with the dead machines checking al the usual things like fuses on the mains and then working into opening up the machines and checking connections, boards and memory properly seated, etc. To cut a long story short over I pinned it down to the power supplies having failed by taking an old power supply from another machine and trying it on the dead ones. This all sounds fairly straight forward but lack of time and pressure of other things at home and work meant this took until the middle of the week to sort out.

In the mean time my main working desktop and started to behave ever more strangely. Crashing, freezing and the graphics display working intermittently. I thought it was the graphics card as I could connect remotely and al seemed to be working normally. A new graphics card and power supplies were ordered. However, the main desktop just got worse and worse. In the end I decided it could only be the motherboard.

What Now?

Well I sorted out the server PC and WHS machine power supplies and they are all working properly. I have a motherboard/processor/memory bundle coming tomorrow (the old mobo/cpu/memory were over 3 years old, therefore well out of date, so I decided to replace the lot).

I have used part of the available time to transfer data and install programs to my Vista machine, which I am using now to write this post. It also means I have been able to move the computers around in the study so it will now be possible to switch between my main desktop with XP and the Vista PC which should help with posts including more Vista programs.

So I hope to resume normal service over the next week to 10 days with 3 to 4 posts a week

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This entry was posted on Sunday, November 23rd, 2008 at 9:09 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.