The computer is your friend. Trust the computer.

[torkell]

Today's annoyances include one half-dead pair of earphones, and one bad-tempered computer.

The earphones are a simple case: a probable break in the wire where it enters the plug results in silence in the right ear. I'm a bit peeved, as I would have thought I'd get more than 6 months of use out of them, given that they are proper earphones (Sennheiser MX 350), and so Should Not Break. And, of course, I can't find the recipt for them. I have a sneaking suspicion that the recipt is in a box in my room at home, but I'm not there so I can't check myself. Ah well, at least I have the backup earphones (Creative branded, but they actually have bass).

Later on, I then decided to tinker with the innards of my desktop. This tinkering, in the end, resulted in me removing the graphics card to gain access to the disk cage, removing said disk cage, adding a hard disk, adding a PCI IDE controller card, moving the optical drives down a slot (arrangement from top to bottom is 3x5.25" half-height external with slide mounting, 1x3.5" external drilled for FDD, 1x3.5" external drilled for FDD or HDD, 2x3.5" internal drilled for HDD), rerouting all the power, rerouting all the IDE cables, rerouting the floppy cable, adding an IDE cable for the new disk, attacking the dust bunnies with a can o' air, removing an unneeded audio cable, cursing the case design several times, contemplating getting my own case built from scratch, and finally replacing the disk cage and graphics card. In roughly that order.

Whereupon the computer refused to power on. After much cursing and easter-egging of various parts (new hardware, graphics card), I unplugged the Antec PSU and bodged a feed from the precursor, at which point everything started working. After a bit of headscratching Nick suggested trying the Antec again, and lo and behold it too worked.

Obviously the computer was feeling neglected and wanted some attention.

Comments

[13th-einherjar.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, the best pair of earphones I've ever owned comes from radio shack, and were marketed and designed as a gaming/voip headset. As far as they look and sound, it's almost as if I've bought a smaller version of the professional headsets we use at War News Radio.

Also, I have a computer right now that needs to be power off (both softly and switched-wise) for a number of seconds before it will properly boot. I'm still trying to figure out what part is blocking it, but I've already tried replacing/removing the graphics, firewire and sound cards. At this point, I'm just trying to get it to boot into a proper blue screen of death, so that I may have working hardware on which to install Linux.

[torkell]

Hmm, sounds like somethings holding a charge or data when it shouldn't be. Could be the memory. I can't think of anything else, but then again I've seen some pretty weird combinations of symptons and solutions before now.