(Untitled)

[edithmatilda]

Amelia is broken, which is not good. I have not looked at her yet but am told that her power button flashes and she makes a strange thud noise but nowt else happens. That sounds like Broken to me. Bad broken where much of her is permanently bollocksed. Ho hum

Comments

[diarytypething]

I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but your description of what has happened to Amelia sounds exactly the same as my old laptop when the motherboard was knackered. There's not really much you can do about it because replacing the motherboard costs about the same as buying a new computer. However, there is one small consolation because the whirry noise means the hard-drive is still functional and your files will still be there, so if you get the right kind of case you can turn it into an external hard drive for less than it would cost to have the contents transferred on to CD.

[edithmatilda]

That's what I thought based on vague memory and Google. She's more than five years old so really it is hardly amazing.

I can salvage her sound card, speakers, both hard drives (one is external anyway), monitor, etc blah, so mainly I need actual base unit with passable graphics card (Amelia's is AGP and thus pretty much obsolete) and it should be more possible than it might've been. We have Maverick and Harry, so Internet can still happen. Bit if an arse just having bought a netbook, but I am secretly glad I have Harry and can lurk online in bed.

[edithmatilda]

Also, those drive case things are a GIFT.

[wishfulaces]

Computer wrongness is probably the seventh circle of hell. Nothing else can send me into rage and fear so instantaneously and so thoroughly as computer wrongness. Though I did just this week--I think, hope--manage to clean my hard drive of trojans without having to reformat, which really terrifies me due to never having done it before.

[edithmatilda]

I reformatted once. It wasn't bad and my puter was suddenly a lot faster. I think my main terror is that I will BREAK SOMETHING but since Amelia sounds broken beyond belief anyway I'm sort of past that.

[wishfulaces]

That is my main terror, that I will do something WRONG and never ever ever be able to fix it. Which is really quite ridiculous, but it's a hard terror to overcome.

Different for Amelia though, yes, since it does sound fairly broken. Could you even reformat in that case? I hope you can sort something out that doesn't involve turning it into a paperweight.

[edithmatilda]

I do not feel my fear is ridiculous. I have no skills and cannot afford to replace the hunk of steaming metal my mistakes create!

I suspect we're talking paperweight, alas. The graphics card is newish but AGP so would not be likely to go in any new puter. It would be quite worth sticking it on Freecycle anyway, for people stuck on ageing machines. The sound card and speakers can be installed in a new thing and the monitor's passable, which is something. And hard drives etc should be OK as far as I know. My gimmicky DVD writer is external, so that too is good for I am lazy.

It is still going to be a while until I can afford a new one though. Fortunately Maverick is OK for slow Second Life, and will play The Sims 2 if you don't mind having to restart every quarter of an hour when the graphics card offs itself. Not that I do that much what with the craziness of it.