If you’ve e-mailed me lately, this is why you haven’t received a response.
I once had a Mac error out so hard that it called me by name. It was a Quadra 840 AV (back in the days when PowerPCs were just debuting). It was my production system—PageMaker, Quark, Photoshop, Illustrator, PhotoStyler, etc—I had crashed the system a few times without any real explanation as to why. Even today Macs rarely communicate anything useful when they crash. Usually the most you get is “Error Type 2″ or “Error Type 10″, which translates to something very generic and broad like “memory error”. The user is then left to figure out what the hell could have caused the error.
On that occassion, the system popped up an error dialogue that read: “I’m sorry, Pariah. The system has encountered a critical error and must shut down.” Thereafter it wouldn’t boot. It gave its esoteric beep code (a code the local IT team had never heard), but otherwise sat cold. The whole machine had to be replaced.
The other day, however, I topped my former computer killing accomplishment. Wednesday I burnt out not only the computer’s power supply, but its CPU, the CPU fan, and three case fans. Impressive, no? The CPU chip, an Athlon XP 1900+, was burnt so badly that it scorched the mother board around it.
On one successful boot to the BIOS we found that, within ten seconds of the system being on (after eight hours sitting cold), the processor chip’s temperature rose above 186 degrees.
Apparently the various problems my system has experienced over the last few months have all been related to temperature and voltage variances caused by what ultimately killed the machine.
I’m great with fixing software issues, and I’m not too bad with the basics of hardware (e.g. building a system from components, adding drives and cards, etc.), but I know when the problem is out of my league. This problem is. I found a great local computer guy, Tom, who plays in the league of my current hardware problems. Tom is eighteen and works at the area’s top computer component store as a salesman. On the side he fixes and builds systems.
While my system was top of the line sixteen months ago when I had it built—I even had to wait for some unreleased components to be shipped during the build—some of the components have since been proven faulty. Minor things, I’m told, like the motherboard, the case, and the CPU fan. Now they all need to be replaced.
Oh, and the last few days’ e-mail, which had downloaded to my local Outlook (thus removing it from the server), is locked up on the harddrive of my now melted system.
Guess what I’m doing this weekend?
Thia
My husband just replaced his hard drive after more reboots and reformats than we can count. He tried everything before going out and buying another b/c he wasn’t sure that it really was the problem…it was. So, I feel your pain.
Chris
well it is a more elaborate excuse than simply saying that the cat peed on your hard drive.
Pariah Burke
Thia: Fortunately my harddrives were ok. I backup to an external, firewire 80GB drive religiously. Still, if I needed to reformat, it would take me days to get everything reinstalled and reconfigured to the way I use my computer. As you can see, I don’t use a standard Windows user interface. Then there’s all the applications—virtually everything Adobe makes, half the Macromedia suite, Microsoft’s Office system, and so on. I hate reformats.
Pariah Burke
Chris: Funny you should mention that. No, a cat didn’t pee on my harddrive, but our computers are about the only thing the cats aren’t spraying or peeing on. There’s a great territorial dispute occurring among the feline factions of our household. While they war—Psss! I claim this cabinet in the name of Molokai! Psss! This chair is no longer Maverick’s. It is now the sole property of Chloe!—we run around trying Feliway spray and spankings and yellings to preserve the sanctity of our things.
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Computer Meltdown (restoration)
My new computer (front)As you may recall from my Computer Meltdown (literally) post, this past Wednesday I burnt out not…
c
Babe, you almost make it funny. Almost…=P
Pariah Burke
Gotta [blam!] have [bang!] a sense of [clang!] humor about [crunch!] computers [bam! bam! bam!] and their [smash!] problems. Otherwise [blam!] you’ll have to [ker-rang!] start [crunch!] pounding on the [slam!] stupid things!