Supernaut's CMOS battery was deader than Elvis, and somehow the settings all got zorched. Maybe I hit F10 when I should have hit ESC...
Anyhow, with a new battery and some tinkering around at the repair counter at Fry's, we're up and shambling, hopefully long enough to get a new bare-bones desktop screwed together early next month. I'm taking this as a hint that it's time to put the old machine out to pasture.
It's been an adventuresome day, to say the least...
Well the new battery should be good for another 5 years or so at least, if you want to keep using what you've got.
ReplyDeleteYep, 5-7 years for the battery. And if you did not get a bunch of bad electrolytic caps on the motherboard at least that long for MB. (look carefully around the bases of the fat round things standing up on the MB for white powdery stuff and at the tops of them for swelling)
ReplyDeleteIf you are not careful you will be like me, searching E-bay for thin ethernet boards, printer boards, and other stuff to keep the 1993 vintage DOS box running.
No use "updating" if it is neither broken, nor lacks the features you need.
Stranger
Are you going to build up your own desk top PC on the old frame or what?
ReplyDeleteDo youu need desktop?
ReplyDeleteThought you got a 17" Laptop earlier this year, but didn't see anything on the specs for it.
~Glamdring
As Stranger said, check all the capacitors on the MB. I've got a P4 that I had to replace all of them. (Had boot problems, then quit.)
ReplyDeleteTry to get close to the same physical size, and don't expect Fry's to carry them. You would think they would carry MB size caps. Nope. They seem to be getting away from their R&D/hobbyist type origins.
I'm lucky. There's an Iranian immigrant who has a computer repair and sales shop not too far off. Helluva nice guy and knows his business. He bailed out of Iran shortly after the Shah died. He's a Christian and didn't want to risk his family among the muzzies.
ReplyDeleteAnyway his prices are far cheaper than any other computer repair I've found, he's fast and my elf box works really well now.
Gerry N.
You could of course build god's own gaming system complete with RAID 5/10 for about $1000-$1500
ReplyDeleteGlad to hear at least 'some' recovery was possible!
ReplyDeleteBut...but...Elvis isn't dead!! He's in the Witless Projection Program, working in Las Vegas as an Elvis impersonator...
ReplyDeleteGrumpy Squid
To shut down or not to shut down, that is the question.
ReplyDeleteDarrell: Yup.
ReplyDeleteWhen a UNIX server has been running for a decade, no one wants to shut it down.
The CMOS battery is probably quite dead, and no one is sure of the powersupply will return to life, or if the hard drive will still spin up if it gets shut down.
The humiliating part at Fry's was having to be the little old lady who says "Sonny, my computer won't do right..." when I actually built the thing nearly a decade ago. (Well, kinda sorta. I bought a floor display system and then replaced nearly everything but the box and the mobo.)
ReplyDeleteAlthough there was a bright spot:
Me: "Believe it or not, this was a pretty bumpin' gaming box when I built it."
Him: "If it had dual VGA ports on the video card a decade ago, it darn sure was."
If you have an XP license, you could get XP running under VirtualBox and keep using your old copy on your new Win7 box. I did that for an ancient copy of Visio when I couldn't get the company I worked for at the time to spring for a newer version. Amazingly, they sprang for an MSDN license (complete with access to all the XP images).
ReplyDeleteOr you could simply get Windows 7 Professional/Ultimate with the new box and run Microsoft's free XP Mode on it and not have to worry about setting up a stand-alone virtual machine.
ReplyDeleteFirst thing you should do, is back up anything vaguely important on it.
ReplyDeleteBecause if the drive in it is as old as the machine, it's already four years past its rated working life...