Narrowboat

In past years I’ve ventured out on my boat over Christmas or New Year, but not being in education sector any more I don’t get the big slack periods to gallivant off. So I’m not afloat until March, unless I grab a free weekend.
The boat is moving bases this year, we’ve managed to get a slot at Norbury and so I’ll be moving it in March. Should be able to capture it to make a nice video. The question is do I get a small inverter for it or use the boats inverter. Does a big fan-cooled inverter use more energy?

I’ve finally solved my PC boot problem, and it wasn’t what I thought it was.

As of my last posts on the subject I’d eliminated the graphics card and the Operating System (as of suggestions of it being a virus) which left the likely candidates being a component on the motherboard or the memory. Everything had gone through rigorous tests, which was a puzzle. So to eliminate the memory I tried booting up with 1GB (I had two 1GB sticks), and the same happened whichever memory I used, so I had decided that the motherboard needed replacing.

This morning I’d got out an old PC case (as I’d got a mico case a while back and put my PC in that) and suddenly had the idea of trying my old PSU – the thought being if it could be a micro component on my motherboard that works once warmed up, surely the same could be said of my PSU. So I removed the PSU, took the cover off my micro PC and hooked the old PSU up without removing the board (after all no point in putting the 350W one in if it was the mother board and not the micro case’s 450W PSU). It worked!! It booted up straight away without crashing – left it on for 10 mins then turned off and left it to cool before doing it again – tried once again and it worked again. So relieved.

I can only assume that as its a switching PSU, it switches so not enough wattage comes through – either that or the PSU has its own POST? So bye bye Aspire PSU.

In running this blog I was using Wordpress and Gallery 2, the latter is quite an extensive system with lots of features I don’t use – it’s also a fair bit of my server space, so I decided to try a change.

I’ve gone to Coppermine, which is a lot smaller and a great for what I need. The only problem was integrating it into Wordpress. I’ve spent several hours trying plug-ins etc when I cam across a blog post that seemed to work. Of course I now just need to upload some more photo’s, now that I have more space.

When sorting out PC problems, its best trying to reduce the possibilities. The error code windows gave me (when I turned on the option to give it) indicated a hardware fault. As it often crashed when in BIOS (so XP not loaded), I decided to try with components removed (as had been suggested on a comment to my previous post). So starting from a cold PC (not been on for hours) I removed the Hard Disk and Graphics card meaning my system now comprised of

• motherboard (with onboard graphics)
• CPU (with heatsink and fan)
• DVD drive
• One stick of 1GB memory (removed one)

I’d enabled  the onboard graphics before booting from the DVD drive (using a linux CD) and it crashed. After rebooting, it stayed up and went through a rigerous memory test okay, so it’s unlikely the memory.

So it could well be a component on the motherboard with a tiny fracture that is okay once the PC is on for a few minutes and warmed up.

The only thing is I’ve an ASROCK socket-939 board, and there aren’t many 939 boards around. So do I try to seek one, or go for motherboard-cpu combo of another socket type (trying to keep the cost down so it may be of another unpopular socket if I do, which isn’t too bad as when I do want to upgrade properly I’ll most likely need faster memory anyway)

Oh fun. I’ve been having PC problems – it keeps crashing once I turn it on, though after several attempts it stays on and is stable. I’ve been searching for solutions, and although quite a few tech support sites suggest hardware, I don’t seem to be able to find any way I can test as causing a problem, since once XP is up everythings stable (even if I try and stress the system).

So that’s one reason I’ve not posted any videos, though not the only one.