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What do you think of it?

I think this is a keeper…  until I get bored of looking at it (again).

New web design is launched

On a side note, I should really have a t-shirt with the superman logo on it.

Apparently, unbeknown to me, the computer at his office has been acting up. Every few minutes/hours/days (it’s somewhat random) the computer screen would just go solid black for a fraction of a second, and then back to normal. So it was workable, but annoying. Then, out of nowhere the screen would just get these totally random pixelated messy blocks and stay like that. It would be completely locked up.

The computer has an Asus P5PE-VM motherboard, which has on-board video.

I remembered that I had an old-ish (but brand new) motherboard and CPU in the basement, so I grabbed them, popped them in, but they were the wrong type, so the CPU fan didn’t fit.

So I decided that I would boot up in safe-mode, and run some diagnostic burn-in software to see if there were any errors that came up. It ran flawlessly for 90-minutes. I thought that maybe it was just luck, so I booted up into Windows normally, ran the software, and within 5-minutes – BAM – locked up and frozen.

That to me sounded like it was a driver problem. So, I upgraded the video drivers, windows updates, etc, etc. Nothing helped!

My next thought was to put in an AGP or PCI video card, and disable the on-board one.

So I found an old 16MB Voodoo 3D card that I had lying around. Popped it in, got into the BIOS, disabled the on-board video, and voila – no black flickering, no crazy mess of video displaying.

Outstanding!

Until…

The computer just totally locked up… out of nowhere.

Now it makes sense… it had to have been the RAM. You see, on-board video cards use a fraction of the RAM to run.

So off into the BIOS I go, play around with the timing, and whatnot, but no dice… the computer was still locking up.

I called Tom to see if he had any RAM kicking around – he wasn’t home but thought he did. A few hours passed, I’m playing around with other settings, cooling, but nothing worked.

Finally, I remembered that I had some old RAM. At least I thought I did. I spent about 30-minutes looking for it, and then I found them. I had 5 “older” sticks – 4x 512MB, and 1x 256MB. I remembered though that one of them was BAD… but why would I have labeled them? Why would I have kept bad RAM in the first place? I have some kind of nasty need to retain old computer junk for no good reason – well… in this instance (for the RAM) it was no good reason, but it was a good thing I had the video card.

So I pop in the first one, I run memtest-86 on it… after 35-minutes it found an error. This goes on for all the RAM. EACH FRIGGEN STICK IS BUSTED!

Why would I have kept bad RAM? What is wrong with me?

Anyways, going to pick-up new RAM tomorrow, and we’ll see what happens… hopefully that’s the end of it.

The 5-sticks of dead ram...

Check it out, and let me know what you think.

Long live version 6!

Let me know what you think. Feedback is ALWAYS welcomed!

Everyone had a great time, and on top of that, we tied for 6th place, and landed in the top 8 out of 56 teams!

GO Recreational Hazards GO!

Here are some photos from the day…

We submitted the award in the “Best Audio + Visual and/or Multimedia” category and place third. This is a very big deal, as we went up against all other colleges and universities across Canada.

A lot of hard work, hours of tweaking and testing, and it paid off. YAY!

I have recently closed down several projects, and will be selling the following domains. If you’re interested, please contact me.

• canadalovesny.com
• canadalovesnyweekend.com
• entertocontinue.com
• hotelbiz.ca
• hotelbiz.com
• whatastupididea.com
• x-marksthe.com

Put your offers in…

We’ve fixed her computer, speaker system, and entertainment system.

So what did she do?  She bought us NERDS!!! I haven’t had these things in years… mmm…

Check them out and let me know what you think.

• Durham College – www.durhamcollege.ca
• UOIT – www.uoit.ca
• Durham College + UOIT – www.dc-uoit.ca

Hi David. I seem to have a problem that needs to be looked at over at my office. It’s the rack mount. It looks like PCI slots have bit the big one. I don’t know if the MOBO is fanito or what the story is but it can’t see any of the slots. I can’t get on the net which also means my network is down and that is never good for us.

Can you let me know what you think can be done and when you can come and take a look for me.

Thanks;

A few things to note:

• He’s a nice guy
• He’s somewhat technical – hence the jargon about the PCI slots

Due to conflicting schedules and whatnot, I end up going to his office today to take a look at the computer. This is what I found:

• He tells me that his employee was sitting in the room and noticed that the computer rebooted itself, and when it started up, it showed device errors.
• He tried to update the drivers and such, but to no avail – which is when he got in touch with me.
• The computer is running Win XP Pro and appears to be functional
• I check the device manager, and there are some devices that are not recognized
  • modem is not recognized
  • network adapter is not recognized
  • RAID adapter is not recognized
• I try to run the update drivers function, but it doesn’t find the drivers
• I shut down the system, unplug the power cable, clear all the power out of the system, and boot it back up
• Takes me to the same problem as before – problem still persists.
• After talking with him, we decided to run system restore to put the computer back about 2 weeks ago – right before the problem happened. Booted the system back up, and still doesn’t recognize the same devices.
• At this point, I figure that it’s a hardware problem, and perhaps a PCI slot has died – happened to me before.
• I open up the case, use my compressed air to clean out some dust – there really wasn’t much. I put the can down on a counter behind me.
• I notice that the modem is the only PCI device. The network card and RAID controller are on-board.
• I smell something a bit weird. I stick my head into the case to smell to see where it’s coming from. It’s smells a bit like a burnt capacitor or something.
• I turn back to get my air can, and when I turn back to the computer, I notice something that looks like a large dust ball. Take a look at what I found in the following 2 pictures (My client Elliot took them – I didn’t have my camera with me)

• As soon as I see this, I stand up and say to him “Dood – you have a problem”. He’s like WTF are you talking about? I tell him he has a mouse in the computer and he’s like “NO – ARE YOU KIDDING?”. Anyways, he hesitates, and I say “Come here and check it out”. He says “I don’t want to see it!”… I push him a bit more – he comes over – sees it – calls his fahter to come and take a look.
• Long and the short – he gets some latex gloves on, grabs the mouse (as if I would do that!) and puts it in a plastic bag to throw out. As he’s grabbing it, he says that it’s crispy! LOL
  
• He later confessed to me that he opened up the machine a few days ago, and didn’t notice or smell anything.

I was taking a look at the case, and found that 2 of the slots in the back of the computer didn’t have the slot covers installed. The mouse was quite small, so I’m presuming that’s where it got into the case. I guess it’s a good thing it didn’t find it’s way to any of the fans in the case!

Anyways, I tried to get the devices working – moved the modem to a different PCI slot, updated drivers, etc. – nothing worked. Now I have to see if I can get him another Asus P4C800 – so that it will not require new drivers and such.

That’ll be the last time that I go to a clients without a camera!

I’ve seen other things on the internet about how someone found their pet snake in their computer, but I’ve never witnessed this myself in the 15+ years I’ve been doing this!