Grabbed Terminal 3 from upstairs and now she wont start and I can’t get a screen to hook up because the motherboard has male end instead of female ¬_¬ (Took out secondary video card to check it now she’s just beeping at me when I power up)
Those beeps are error codes – take a note of them, and look them up on the interwebs under “POST” (Power On Self Test) codes for your mainboard.
Thing of the day:
Since getting an Acer for my 18th birthday, I’ve never owned a bought-box PC. I’ve cannibalised and built my own. The very first one I ever built was with my dad – we’re not a Father-And-Son-Bonding-Activity kind of family, and this kind of thing is incredibly rare for us – and was built out of bits we’d bought from Simply Computers (Now part of the Misco empire).
We spent hours diligently reading the manuals, and placing each bit like we were assembling a nuclear bomb. Anything fluffy or woolly was banned from the room we worked in – including the dog, much aggrieved – until we carefully fixed everything in place and – like the rank amateurs we were – screwed the back of the case in place.
We took out the book of POST codes,
plugged it in,
turned it on.
It beeped.
Not a single polite “Awake now” beep, comforting and secure,
Nor a double or treble – “Huston?” beep, distressing but accounted for.
No this was the siren wail of a computer miswired, misconfigured, mismanaged, a speaker wired to the power that would not ever shut up. The off-button didn’t work, and eventually we pulled the power from the back, and it died like the wicked witch of the west, screaming as it starved of power.
It didn’t come back on again, not ever.
I’ve never really found out what we did wrong. We took the bits back (In Small-World syndrome, to a warehouse within a mile of my first house in London) and paid a replacement fee, and the next time it worked, but even until this day I feel that the book of POST requires an extra entry, right at the end:
Long, continuous, high pitched, never ending beep:
You, mate, are entirely and comprehensively fucked.
My new motherboard for Graupel doesn’t even come with a motherboard speaker, there’s a segmented digital display that displays a hexadecimal code to look up in the manual (It flickers though them as it boots, so you can see how long each stage takes if you have a fast enough camera), and for a moment when I installed it, I missed the old POST codes.
Then I remembered why I haven’t installed a motherboard speaker since 2003, and the feeling passed.
