first my rant....... you've all heard of the snowball effect right? this is classic..... especially for me and computers. First off, I had an old P1 w/mmx computer running win95 on dial-up until last november. I bought the thing new in 1996. Except for adding some ram, it worked fine for me and my autocad design work that I do on the side.

Well kid1 finds out that there's a new wireless tower on a mountain top about 10 miles away. I tell him to look into it, and that I'll buy the hardware and we'll do the install. And then kid1 and kid2 pay the monthly bill. I'm just happier than hell, wireless net for $150 The wireless company gave us a satellite dish and a switch. no charge

To be in site of the mountain, the dish is planted in the ground 300 feet from the house. We bury wire for 200 feet to get to a power supply. then we go wireless to a server in the house and then wireless out to the three desktops and two laptops.

now the snowball effect starts.....

we put the fancy dancy wireless card into the trusty ole puter. BAM, nothing. Kid says oh, we need a different card. I see it coming. We buy another card, which we ended up needing anyway. BAM, nothing. It endz up these cards only work with win2k or xp. O.k., kid's got like 3 win2k disks and four xp disks. we go to install, BAM, nothing. Neither will run on my old P1. So...... I end up throwing most of a perfectly good working computer in the trash. I guess it WAS old, but thamn.

So, I utilize my cheapness and net surfing skills to build a new computer. I'll be thamned if I'm going to spend $500+ on a new computer when I just threw a good one in the trash. So I shop and shop. I end up buying, so the kid says, a decent motherboard, processor, ram, case and power supply from pc club for $184. I order it, wait two dayz, pick it up, set it up, fire it up, and THAMN this wireless $**** is FAST. I'm a happy camper for 6 months.

Now the problem. I go to fire the pute up one day, it starts up and when it starts to go to windows it shuts off. I'm like wtf!!!! I try it a few more times. same thing, I'm like crap, So, not having a clue, I boot to the winCD, same thing. I disconnect the hard drive and boot to the CD, same thing. GOD THAMN!!!!! O.K. it's not the hard drive. (I'm tired of reloading all my crap on thereanyway) Something makes sense..... I pull out the ram chip and put it in another slot......... BAM!!!!!! IT WORKS. I'm designing and surfing again. One week later, I go to fire it up, BAM, same problem. I switch the ram chip back,...... nothing.......... I go to bed. The next day, I pop out the battery for a while, put it in, BAM it works. By now I'm a little concerned tho. The next day, it didn't start up again. I switch slots for the ram chip, fire it up and I get a buzzing sound outta the speakers and a burning plastic smell. I smoked that SOB. I pull out the ram chip and three of the contacts are melted.

So whaddaya think? smoked mother board and ram? or just the ram? I guess I know the answer because the melted copper from the chip went somewhere. Damn.

If you didn't fall asleep reading this, hopefully you got a chuckle......

 

well, I work at best buy in the computer department, and I can give you some answers. The reason why your older computer didn't work is because for wireless cards to work, you need to have at least win98 second edition. 95 won't support it, and 98 first edition was too buggy for it to work.

As for frying your ram/mobo, I'd try buying another stick of ram, and putting it into another one of your ram slots. If you're lucky, it'll just be the ram and that one slot that went bad. Worse case scenario, you have to get a new cpu/mobo combo, but then you can switch out all of your parts from this last computer you fried.

Good luck, if you have any questions, feel free to ask!

 

are you still using the old hard drive??
what kind of internet security do you have on it?
edit: those questions are irrelevant

do you still have the same case?
how many fans are in it?

184 for all that stuff is pretty cheap
i spent about 600 on mid-performance parts
can you give some specs on the parts?

 

Windows XP reboots like that when starting up if it thinks the motherboard has been changed since Windows was first installed. You have to have a fresh install of Windows XP if you change the motherboard or change a hard drive into a different computer. This is part of XP's copy protection. It reads the serial number of the BIOS or Motherboard when first installed.

If you were using XP on your old P1 junker, and then swapped the hard drive into a newer computer then you got lucky but maybe Windows XP eventually figured it out. If you re-install Windows XP fresh then you should be ok. If you have stuff you want to keep off your current hard drive, then buy a new (or used) 2nd hard drive. Plug that guy in and install Windows XP. Then you can plug your 'old' hard drive in as a second drive and be able to copy or access the data on there you wanted. If all you want to do is surf the web then you can probably just erase the drive you're using and do a new install.

 

Fast240Z: Yeah, I was thinking of trying that, but we don't have any old ram chips laying around and I'd hate to smoke another one if it's the m/b. Do you think I coulda smoked the cpu too ..............

I bought the m/b, cpu, 512mb ram, case and power supply. I dumped the old 4g hdd and put in a 20g we had laying around. Used the old 1.44 fdd, cd-rw, mouse and 21" moniter. the old keyboard had to go too. We started with a clean hdd and first loaded win2k and then decided on winxp pro.

b300z: Junior's got a firewall running on the server in the closet. When I hooked it up the new stuff, it only had the cpu fan which would overheat in about 15 minutes. I added two fans. One at the front and one at the back of the case. Plus I the blocked off the side vents to get a nice flow thru.
Here's what I bought, it's only $119 now +512mb ram:

http://www.pcclub.com/systems_config...bomid=UPG01031

Bleach: yeah we started from scratch on the new hdd since we were going with new m/b and o/s. I used to run slave drives when the kids used my computer. I had too much stuff on there to worry about them messin' it up. The whole new computer came about cuz the wireless card or the o/s wouldn't run on the p1.

I still laugh when I think about these things. I bought my first pc in 1987. I tell my kid, you remeber when we fired that 8088 up and all we saw was a black screen with "c:\"? When I rolled into a 80286 in 1989, my Autocad was like one of the high end number crunching programs with the wild color graphics. I'd say it's pretty tame compared to the games you guys play.

Thanks for the input.........

 

Did you use the right NGK plugs? What kind of oil are running in it?

 

OH $HIT, I forgot the oil..............

 

Drop back 10 yards and punt

 

The kidz' computer set-up is pretty cool. He's got two moniters set-up so I can design on one and shop for parts / cars on the other. Is that what you guys call multi-tasking?

 

that's dual display.

 

yeah, my laptop has that capability, i can surf on one and watch family guy on streaming tv! by the way, if you want to try that, download nullsofts winamp and check out internet tv. theres always simpsons, family guy, and a bunch of other shows playing continuously.

 

So anyway..................pc club is going to honor the warranty. i gave them the motherboard and ram chip. they said it might take two weeks to get back...............
Lucky me, I got to buy another toshiba laptop this weekend. Kid2 has to have a high school graduation present.
I'm kinda getting used to sitting out in front of the house watching the sun set while sufring the net. If I could only figure out how to get my autocad for windows running on a laptop with Linux o/s.