Part 2 of many: Trigger's Broom

“I’ve maintained it for 20 years. This old broom has had 17 new heads and 14 new handles in its time.“ – Trigger, Only Fools And Horses.

In my cleverness and advanced ability to confuse myself, I managed to buy the wrong RAM (DDR2 instead of DDR) and forgot to get the required IDE-to-SATA cable for the hard drive. And of course no new HDD means no new OS. The rainbow LED fan looks and works brilliantly though!

And so I was faced with a decision. Return my new memory and a small DDR memory for more money – being that DDR doesn’t come in big sizes (hence the invention of DDR2) and that DDR costs more as DDR2 has a larger market, or, buy a new motherboard that can support DDR2.

I decided to get a new motherboard. Having to drop to 2GB RAM and paying more than twice as much for it did not appeal, and motherboards are pretty cheap. However, my processor is also old. So old, there are very few motherboards available that have the right socket. So – new processor it is.

While I was there, I ordered a new monitor as well. Might as well go the whole hog.

So now on top of the prawn that arrived yesterday, I now also have a 19 inch widescreen monitor, a Intel Pentium Dual Core processor 2.5GHz and an ASUS Intel P35 motherboard on their way. Gosh – just as well I didn’t buy a whole new computer, eh!

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I have had the best evening – last night I dismantled the computer completely, trying to work out what processor socket the motherboard had. I put it back together again but didn’t test it. This evening I tried to boot it up and of course it failed to boot. All the fans came on merrily, but the hard drive was silent and the screen unresponsive. With the lovely rainbow LED fan it really was a case of “the lights are all on, but nobody’s home”.

I’ll spare you the tale of me trawling various teching for blondes sites trying to decipher where the failure was whilst having various partially functioning computer guts spread over the floor. Failure 1) was not plugging in the 12V power supply (a variation of “is it actually plugged in?”) and failure 2) was the heat sink of the CPU had got stuck to the processor with the thermal paste, and being that I’ve never played with CPUs before I wasn’t aware it wasn’t supposed to be dragged out by it’s heat sink and was in fact supposed to be a separate unit. Not being separate meant that when I put it back in, it wasn’t locked in and thus the processor was not in fact attached to the motherboard. Kinda explains the non-booting.

Some sticky-stuff remover and a fish knife later, and the processor was separate, rebedded in it’s socket, partially covered with manky old dry thermal paste that I attempted to reconstitute with the solvent and the computer reassembled. Again. I’ll need to add some new paste I think when I can get some – I’ll see if my new toys give me free goo. Mmmm – free goo…

And, apart from a bizarre complication that all the USB ports on the motherboard are now apparently not powered, whereas the extra ones on the front of the chassis are (this is the reverse situation to pre-disassemblement), the computer is up and running! I know there is info re: non-powered USB ports out there somewhere so gonna go a-goog’ling now.

So yeah – fab evening spent problems solving and Achieving! And yes, it is still achieving if you broke it in the first place. For example, now I know what thermal paste is and how to dissolve it. Miriad applications for that snippet of knowledge!

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Oh before I go, I must share this review from dabs. This is for a TFT monitor:

“Im in Jersey and it arrived within a couple of days.10/10
Unfortunately, silly me assumed it was a TV, so for all the woman out there that are as quick as me to buy something without looking into it, ive written this…then again if id really thought about, its not likely to get an LCD TV with DVD player for about £75..Derrr! More haste less speed next time!”

o.O Srsly? And I thought I had a stupid moment by ordering DDR2 ram instead of DDR. Now I know the full range of the stupidity of “all the woman” I consider myself practically a visionary. Did you hear the one about the blonde who went into a shop and asked to buy a TV?