As part of the setup I needed to rearrange a lot of my existing AV equipment, including DVD recorder, VCR, LD player (which he finally decided to get rid of), and one of my computers that used to be in another room. I also had to move my broadband modem and router to the living room since most of my networked equipment would be there. If I kept the router in the other room I’d have a lot of equipment running on wireless which isn’t very efficient.
The nightmare began when I moved the computer to the livving room.
Before the horror, we took the advantage of moving out so much equipment to remove some age old dust. I couldn’t believe the amount of dust uncovered in such a small living place.
Once I’ve moved the computer to the living room, I thought it’d be interesting to see how it looked like connecting to a TV. I hooked it up, turned on the PC, and got a pretty good screen on TV, except that it was in B&W. So I did what a normal person would do – play around with the display settings…as soon as I changed one minor thing the whole screen lost sync and turned blue. Normally when one changes display settings, the computer would change it and ask you to click ok in 15 secs to confirm that the change’s ok. However, the screen didn’t come back.
i restarted the PC…only to find that for some reason my wireless keyboard decided not to work. Eventually after placing and pulling cables around several times I got that fixed at least. But by then the screen’s flickering so much that I couldn’t see what I was clicking!
To remedy that situation I hooked up my old monitor. However, while I’ve got the TV connected as well I couldn’t get the monitor to work properly. In the end, I’ve decided to give up the TV connection for now, since my new TV would be here in a couple of days.
My computer has a TV tuner, which I’ve purchased as part of the Media Center TV setup. I connected my TV antanne to it and ran the Media Center PC software. Before I could setup the channels it wanted to get online to get some infpormation. I thought then, well I need to move my broadband to the living room anyways why not do it then?
Moving the broadband modem and router produced a lot of dust in the other room. That plus the removal of a computer practically made that room uninhabitable. However, at that time my concern was to get my internet going.
Although my place isn’t big, connecting the phone jack at the living room to my other room along the wall and over the door frame required a lot of cable, making the relocation that much harder. After tidying up the cables I reconnected my broadband setup…but no broadband connection! After moving the cables some more I found out what the problem was – one of the cable plugs was loose on the cable and I managed to sever it! It’s not a standard network cable so I had no spare for it. I called the provider and after waiting for about 20 minutes I managed to get hold of an officer who said they’d dispatch a person to fix my cable in two days. I got lucky the next day when I asked a colleague of mine to make me another cable which worked and fixed my broadband issue.
I couldn’t say that for my computer that had stayed in the other room.
My other room used to host two computers, a printer and other electronics under the table. You could imagine how messy it was down there. So I decided to take everything out and clean them. Everything was nice and clean by the time I’d finished. The computer that went to the living room used to connect to a mini 5.1 audio speakers but it’ll later connect to a new set so I thought I’d move the existing 5.1 to the computer that stayed.
I connected the cables and boot up my machine. The speakers had three plugs and I managed to plug them to the wrong ports so I started moving them around when my computer suddenly froze. No problem, just need to reboot…it froze in the middle of boot up!
I had the same problem with an other computer not 2 months ago!!!
I tried to resurrect it but no luck so far. I have an XP disk with SP1a but my colleage gave me one with SP2 which I thought would be better. However, I hadn’t figured into the fact that my computer’s originally running XP Traditional Chinese and the disk my colleague gave me was ENGLISH XP. By the time I realized that I was already at a point of no return. Then it asked me for the license key! My own XP SP1a was licensed but the key wouldn’t work with the disk my colleague gave me! So now that computer’s still dead.
Cont…
KenT the Author's Ravings 