One of my housemates was complaining that his computer was too slow, so I offered to have a look at it. And it was in that horrible state that people who are silly cause. The systray was full of useless crap, he had a billion things loading up at the start, and it was a horrible swollen mess.
He wouldn't let me do a clean install, so I went through it uninstalling everything useless, as well as getting rid of all the stuff that was loading at startup. I also ran some registry cleaners through it, and some other things. It worked. It loaded up a lot quicker, and things were nice. But he also wanted to put in a large hard drive, so I checked to see if he'd need a BIOS update. Which he did. So I downloaded it, made a boot disk, reset the computer and...nothing. Nothing at all. The hard drive whirs up, the floppy and CD drives light up and go off, but nothing appears on the screen, and there's no bleeping at all.
I checked the CPU by putting it in my computer, and the hard drive, and they both work. But his computer refuses to even POST. I'd think that I'd mucked up the BIOS, but I hadn't even gotten to the stage of flashing it.
Anyone any ideas at all? It's an AWARD Bios for an old Gigabyte 440BX motherboard. Is it likely to be fried?
Posted by Cartmaniac (Member # 256) on :
Flowsheet time!
Seriously. The thing died after a reset? Before you even touched the BIOS? Then you're in luck. Old age probably did it in. Slip away quietly and don't look back.
Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
And tell your housemate to get a Mac. Posted by Ritten (Member # 417) on :
Yes, they make nice foot stools.
Silly question, but, are all the cables fully contected, I've had some that were rough to plug in and I thought that they were.
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
Yeah, I checked all the cables and stuff. He's taken it to be repaired, but considering that the repair job is likely to be at least �25 minimum, and that it's only a 350 PII, he's probably going to just replace the motherboard, since the repair shop will stick in a new motherboard, Athalon 1700+ and memory for �150.
Posted by Fleet-Admiral Michael T. Colorge (Member # 144) on :
Tell him to upgrade to a new graphics card while he's at it. I know I'm pissed off that I can't use my No One Lives Forever 2 since I have integrated graphics in my laptop.
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
Students. Poor. He's going to cope with his TNT2 for a while, and see what his money's like at the end of the term.
I'll probably end up doing the upgrade as well, as I only have a 450 PII.
Posted by Saltah'na (Member # 33) on :
There are many better cards out there which are reasonably priced. You could get a Radeon 7500 or a GeForce 4 MX 440 for $50 US nowadays.
Riva Sucks.
Posted by Charles Capps (Member # 9) on :
Hell, he'd be better off with a Matrox at this point...
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
Yeah, I know it's not much good, but my suggestion to him was that there's not much point forking out for a cheap graphics card when you'll just have to replace it in a year or so. So I suggested waiting a bit and then getting a proper GeForce 4, or whichever of the ATI cards is reasonable priced (the 9200, I think). They're still only �100 or so, and they'll last a lot longer.
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
On this topic, does anyone remember the registry alteration you have to do to get the overclocking option to come up on nVidia cards? I vaguely remember it was something involving the word "coolbits", but not much beyond that.
Posted by Mucus (Member # 24) on :
Just get Powerstrip or something. But I hope you aren't planning to overclock the TNT2. Thats a little less than productive.
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
No, I wanted it for my only-slightly-less-shit GeForce 2 MX.
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