Upgrades from Hell : Val's Computer

This article was originally posted in aus.talk.ltuae, April 2000

>Then there is Professor Daccles who will again be offering 'Computer
>Upgrades 101'
Ooh, time to tell of my latest Upgrade Fiasco.

So either hit N for next message, or go grab a cup of coffee and have a read ...

Val's computer stopped working the other day. It wouldn't get past power-on-self-test (POST), putting gibberish all over the screen. Val was pretty sad.

We tried unplugging everything from the back of the machine, and plugging it all back in again, but it made no difference, the computere had died.

The guts of the box was my original P90 "overclocked" to 100Mhz, with 64MB memory, three hard drives (540MB, 1.2GB, and 6GB), 8X CDROM, floppy, Tecram SCSI card that I got from Jeff Larsen, which was the SCSI Scanner driver, poxy sound card, S3/Virge 2MB video card, and Accton LAN card. It was too slow to handle Dragon Dictate, and just completely outdated really.

Val spends an enormous amount of her time on her computer, doing stuff, so when it isn't available, she gets sad. We discussed options, and it just wasn't worth 'fixing' the computer, since you can't buy Pentium chips anymore -- only P2, P3, Celerons and Athlon's etc, and even if we went the second hand route, we had no idea what was wrong with the existing system (i.e. it might fuck up again), and it would still be unable to run Dragon Dictate.

The next day, we tried the machine again, and it worked! The 'problem' had gone away overnight! So that was a relief, but it showed how unreliable it was.

So Val checked her finances, and decided to splash $1,000 on the bits to make a new system:

Motherboard $190 (Aopen)
CPU $200 (Celeron 466)
128MB memory $220 (Hyundai 133)
17GB drive $220 (Seagate)
ATX Case $75 (Generic)
40X CD $80 (Aopen)
1.44MB Floppy $27 (Mitsubishi)

She got the bits last Friday. Well actually, that's a lie. We didn't get a floppy or a CDROM until Monday, and that turned out to have been a Big Mistake in the Building A New Machine stakes.

I put the bits together. The motherboard was missing the IDE and Floppy disk cables, which I thought was a A Bit Rude, so I scrounged some up from my cable-collection box. Put in 128MB Memory DIMM, CPU (370 socket), CPU Cooler, then put motherboard into ATX case, then attached new 17GB drive, put in my 'spare' LAN card (3Com Etherlink II), and my 'spare' video card (generic 1MB S3), added my old ps/2 keyboard, borrowed my Linux Box's Logitech ps/2 mouse, and my spare 15" monitor (used for LAN Days [you know, quake, unreal, network games et al] because lugging a 21" monitor to a LAN day is a *joke*)

Plug it in, let her rip, whammo, we have video, we have 466MHz, we have a hard drive recognised. Sweet! Elapsed time -- 45-50 minutes.

Formatting the hard disk is going to be a problem without a Floppy Disk in the system, or a CDROM drive. So it's over to my machine and rip out the CDROM, and over to the 'Spare Parts' box, and pull out two floppy drives -- one a 'donated' floppy from the PCUG GiveAway table, which had a bad door mechanism, and the other an ancient SONY Floppy disk which has a weird combined power/data connector, and a large cable/power-supply adapter board. I scrounged around for a floppy cable, and found one that appeared to be ok.

At this point I should explain that I didn't 'gut' Val's old machine because she was still using it, and I had to transfer the data from her old drives, to the new system, so I didn't want to be taking it apart yet.

I hooked up the CDROM no problems, I hooked up the bad-door drive, and whirr whirr, no floppy. Tried the Sony one, whirr whirr, no floppy. Grrr. Go back to my machine, and rip out the floppy drive, connect it up, whirr whirr, no floppy! GRRR. Tried both connectors on cable, tried it plugged in 'wrong way around', no floppy.

Ok, lets think about this, I said to myself, what about putting in my old 6GB "C" drive which was lying around from when I put a 17GB drive into my system. Go get drive, hook it up, 'invalid system disk'. GRRRRRR. Then I remembered, it was my old "D" drive, not "C" drive, so it didn't have a system on it. Doh!

Back to fixing the floppy -- scrounge for a different floppy cable, can't find one. Get floppy cable from my machine, hook up floppy disk, apply power -- success! We have a floppy disk.

Go back to my disaster-area computer desk, and look for my recently created Windows 98 boot floppy. Can't find it. Looking, looking, can't find it. Look through every single floppy disk in my collection and STILL CANNOT FIND IT. Try booting up with Win95 boot disk 'this disk is out of date', crap! Talk about hassle!

Rip out floppy + cable, and put it BACK in my machine, then make a Win98 boot disk. (Val's old machine is Win95, so I couldn't make boot disk there!) Then rip out cable + floppy, and put it into new system, finally able to boot up, fdisk drive, format it, and install Windows 98.

That done, it was time to get the network going. The network card wouldn't work. I'd had this problem before. I fiddled with the '8bit recovery time' in the BIOS, and eventually got the LAN card going.

Copied Val's existing drives. c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k .. used a batch file to do the copies. It bombed out on drive C, so I restarted it, and it bombed out on drive J. I went to bed at 5am, got up at 9:15 to get read to go to Layout Day with Mique -- copied J successfully, and asked Val to make minimal changes whilst I was out doing stuff at the PCUG centre.

That afternoon, back again, make sure everything is hunky dory with new system, copy over changed files from Val's system, then it's time to swap video and network cards from the old system to the new.

Unhook old system, drag it into kitchen, rip out network card (Accton ISA), rip out video card, put them into new system, close up machine, cart it into computer room, hook up mouse, keyboard, LAN, video, and printer. Power up, beautiful! "I'll just make sure the printer works"

Didn't work. I checked the right cable was plugged in, I checked the power on the printer, I loaded printer drivers from the copy of the old C drive. I rebooted and change the BIOS settings for the Parallel port from 'ECP/EPP' to 'Normal', not working. Tried just ECP, and just EPP. I tried disabling the sound card, I tried changing the IRQ for the printer port. I tried lots of things and nothing would work. The printer would sit their saying 'waiting', and if you forced it to continue, it would print a line of gobbledygook and nothing else.

Fuckity fuck fuck.

I told Val to ignore the printer issue, I'd look at it later, and to go ahead and install/copy software (i'd only made copies of her old drives, not actually installed software). Immediately she said 'there is no drive 'L' in the copied-disks directory. I said 'that was your CDROM, silly', she said, no, that's where IRC was. Turned out she was right, and I'd stopped copying at drive K, when there was indeed an L partition. Sheesh.

So back to the old sytem, plug in generic S3 video card, plug in 3COM Network Card, make sure BIOS setting is at longest possible wait state for 8bit and 16bit I/O, but still have mondo problems getting network card speaking to LAN. Finally got it going, and copied the 200+MB of drive L to Val's new system.

Now all that was left to do was clean up the grotty insides of the old system. I found out immediately what had caused the system failure --a gross buildup of greasy dust deposits on the CPU cooler fan -- it would hardly move. I removed the fan, and removed the clogged up dust, and it spun freely, so I figured that was fixed. I attacked the rest of the machine, pulled out the SCSI card, removed cables, removed the 540MB and 1.2GB hard drives, and used the Pastry Brush to remove as much dust as possible from the cables, motherboard and surroundings. It was a lot of dust. The power supply had heaps of dust clogged to it, so I decided to open it up and clean it out.

Wow! It's a wonder it hadn't caught on fire, it was choked with dust. I must have removed 250grams worth of dust from the power supply enclosure and fan assembly! Such a LOT.

Hook up system, ask Val if she's sure it's ok to reformat drive, and she said 'I want another backup', so hook it up and do a backup of the 6 partitions on the 6GB drive over the LAN onto her new machine.

That done, I went into IRC and played cards. During the night I decided to try hooking up the printer via LAN (since it has an ethernet card, we just never used it). No amount of fiddling with the front panel switches would let me change the IP address of the printer. I went to the web site, and downloaded the FS1600A owners manual in PDF format -- no mention of the network card, and the download of a 9MB file took FOUR HOURS. Then I downloaded the EcoLAN documentation, and it said 'some firmware revisions do not allow the changing of IP address via front panel, you have to use DHCP' (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol). Well FUCK, I don't HAVE DHCP. Consider setting it up on Linux box, but then said 'nah, fuck it'.

Tried downloading peer-to-peer printing via IPX, but the application couldn't see the printer. Eventually ripped off LAN cable, and put back on the Parallel cable, and gave it another go -- worked first time! Printing no longer a problem, and I HADN'T DONE ANYTHING. Grrr.

Monday comes around, Val goes out and buys a two new CDROM (40x) drive and two new Floppy drives. One of each for her new machine, and one of each for me, so I don't have to take things OUT of my existing machine when building machines for other people!

I set about reinstalling the old machine to give to a friend of ours who currently has a poxy 486 with 8MB memory. I put on Windows 98, and then try to connect to network -- can't do it. No matter what I do, the network card will NOT work. I had picked up another Etherlink II card from the PCUG give-away desk, and I tried that, with exactly the same results. It WORKED under Windows 95, but refused to work for more than 5 seconds at a stretch under Windows 98. GRRRRR.

Go to install Office 97. Whirr Whirr goes the CDROM, but won't recognise the CD. Whirr whirr whirr. Nope. Try a sound CD, it works, but sound output is really soft. I mean REALLY soft. General sounds are very soft with this Crystal sound card, so I got my old Creative Vibra 16 Plug'n'play sound card and installed that. Nearly blasted my ears off! Played music CDROM, but only on one channel! Tried normal sounds, and they were both channels. Rip out CDROM- >sound-card cable, and put in a replacement - that worked. Dodgy cable problem, grrrr.

Try installing Office -- still cannot read CDROM.

Sod it. Remove 8X cdrom, and put in the new 40X CDROM. Install office, install outlook98, everthing finally done.

Val's new machine positively purrs, it's so quiet!. And it's fast. Her machine is now faster than my P2-400, which is a bit galling really.

Her old machine is up and running, and will be a birthday present for a friend to replace his poxy proprietary 486 box with pathetic 200MB drive and 8MB of memory.

So it all worked out in the end.

I trashed the old non-working floppy disk drives, and have discarded the non-functional floppy cable, and I'm >< close to discarding both of the Etherlink II cards, and getting a cheap PCI network card for 'system builds'.

As always, I hope that there is something in this tale which helps others in future. And to those of you who just think it's funny to laugh at my woes, well I hope it was amusing for you too.

Dac

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