October 5, 2005

Things For This Morning

For those of you who wish to see some sort of evidence of the size of our harvest of chillis, here is a photo. Please bear in mind that these are just the ones that we haven’t eaten yet.

chilli-string-small.jpg

In other news, my new bits arrived yesterday, and I installed them last night. The only significant problem that I encountered was Linux support for the video chipset on the motherboard, but the generic vesa drivers seem to work okay. Google is your friend, but you knew that already.
I left the computer off overnight and turned it on this morning with my fingers metaphorically crossed. Detecting IDE devices… and frozen. Turned off, turned back on again, everything’s fine. I’m trying to cross-reference this to what I know from my tests, and the only item that seems to have been present in all situations is the power supply, which is only a year old, and rated at 350W. So I guess that means this evening I’ll be pulling Karen’s out of her computer.
The “problem”, if you’d like to call it that, is that the temperature is dropping, and so the computer will be entering its “it’s winter, I’m going to behave” phase, which makes it hard to really figure out what’s going on.
And before you go off on a “Haha, Pete wasted all that money!” song and dance, last night I plugged my recording desk into the line-in and managed to record a nice high quality mix without any furriness or distortion. Which means that I can abandon Windows forever. Woo!
Ah, well. Happens.

Pete

13 thoughts on “Things For This Morning

  1. I’ve tried that before. It doesn’t work, for some reason. It may be about more than just temperature – perhaps the orientation of the earth’s axis, squirrel hibernation cycles, the number of lairy semi-naked young ladies walking home from the pub on a Friday night – all of these could be factors.

    Pete on October 5, 2005
  2. Before I figured out what it was, my cloud-reading brain thought that tree of chilli peppers was some kind of freaky Giger-esque alien.

  3. It does look like Giger may have been consulted. If those are the ones that haven’t been eaten, I fear for those who ate the others…
    My computer is playing up, too, but I’m sick of worrying about it. Maybe I’ll replace the graphics card.

  4. It’s probably spite. You will be able to change every single aspect of the computer, and it’ll still happen.
    It’s probably Bill Gates’ fault.

    Stark on October 6, 2005
  5. Yeah, well said. I think that the best thing that I can do in this situation is to force myself to stop worrying about it.

    Pete on October 6, 2005
  6. It’s a bit risky but you could put a hair drier on it to see if it causes the problem.
    Have you tried a completely new and clean IDE cable? I have a spare one if you want, I can pop it in the post.

  7. I put in fresh IDE cables when installing the new motherboard. The only item that hasn’t been replaced since it started playing up is the primary hard drive, but I’ve been able to reproduce it with the primary hard drive disconnected.
    It makes no sense. I therefore deduce that it’s all in my mind. Subsequently, if I can destroy my mind, then the problem will be destroyed too.
    These biros look useful.

    Pete on October 6, 2005
  8. You cannot destroy your mind with a biro.
    What will they say at the funeral?
    “Pete was a man who died with a biro in his head”. The afterlife will become the afterlaugh, and you’ll spend eternity being giggled at by people who died of cotton-wool poisoning.
    No. There must be a less biroid way out out of this. Have you tried turning the memory check on your bios on, or on to full-check mode? Give the hard-drive time to warm up before the bios check.

    Stark on October 6, 2005
  9. It could be that when it’s booting up it’s still looking for the primary HDD previously configured in BIOS. If it is the HDD it could still be causing problems even when not plugged in (I know it doesn’t make sense). I still have a spare 40gb drive if you want to try it.

  10. Oh, I’m aware it’s possible, and even desirable in certain circumstances, but it is not – in this specific case – recommended.

    Stark on October 6, 2005

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