Random Failures, SimCity, and the Core i7

These don't seem to go together, do they? In fact, if you think the title makes sense, you're lying, crazy, or you've been following what I've been doing the past couple of days.

Everything started when I woke up on Monday, my first day of spring break. I slept until about 8:30, woke up, and figured I'd check my email and maybe read the news before breakfast. I walked over to my computer, which was in standby, hit the power button, and...nothing came up. The fans started, but the monitor stayed in power-save. Thinking nothing of it, I rebooted.

Guess what? The monitor still stayed in power-save mode. Okay, suppose the monitor's bad. Or maybe the cable; the last time the screen was all green, I unrationally suspected the graphics card and bought a new one before I realized the cable had died. But my second monitor wasn't picking the signal up either. So I walked down the stairs, grabbed our 21-inch TV, which has a standard computer input, lugged it up, and plugged it in. Power back on. Nothing.

I started thinking, "Hmm, what have I changed that might have caused this?" Thing is, I hadn't installed or changed anything. I had recently installed a sound card, but that was about a week before, and it had worked flawlessly up until then. No, it seemed to point toward some sort of random hardware failure.

I guess the graphics card has to be bad, right? Pull out the graphics card and plug into the graphics built into the motherboard. No luck there either. Maybe the settings are still set to use the nonexistant graphics card? Reset the BIOS settings. No luck.

The computer didn't seem to be POSTing (passing the power-on self test), since it wasn't making the usual sounds it did right before it went to the boot menu. Only problem was that I couldn't see where it failed, since the monitor wasn't working. And the oh-so-unhelpful motherboard (which came in the HP system I bought a couple of years back) didn't make any error beeps or have any helpful lights to tell me what the problem might be.

I did some googling, and found someone who suggested I unplug the computer, hold the power button for 30 seconds, and plug it back in. Worth a shot, I suppose. Surprise, surprise, it didn't work. I removed the battery that holds the settings and tested it, and the battery tester said it was low. I suppose it's worth a try, right? So I bought a new battery. Guess what? The battery tester said it was low. Guess the battery tester's broken too (or at least can't measure that type of battery properly). Naturally, the new battery didn't fix anything.

I started taking out RAM, unplugging the sound card and hard drives, and more, trying to isolate the source of the problem. The same thing kept happening. I was absolutely stumped.

Defeated, I called the Best Buy Geek Squad, and they told me they would look at the system for free. So I dragged it over (getting envious looks and exclamations of how large my case was from employees), and had them look at it. They swapped out the graphics card and had no more luck than I had. The final report was that my motherboard was probably bad.

That was what my assumption had been, too, but I hadn't really wanted to admit it. With nothing else left to do, I went home and ordered a new one. Having a fair amount of money sitting around, I decided that I might as well make the best of it and buy an upgrade that would last me a while, so I bought 6 gigabytes of RAM, a Core i7 processor, and a motherboard. The total bill was a somewhat painful $720.

When it came today, I spent three hours or so cracking the case open and installing the stuff. I had never installed a processor before, and I'm not sure I did such a great job at applying the thermal grease (which goes between the processor and the heatsink), as it seems to be idling at a fairly high 44 degrees Celsius. (I set an alarm to notify me if the temperature breaks 60 degrees, so I know it's starting to heat up and I might need to fix this.)

Nevertheless, my new setup just flies. I installed a clean copy of Windows (and experienced inexplicable freezes during the start of the installation), and there are hardly any delays. I actually feel like I should be typing and mousing faster to compensate! I installed SimCity 4. On my largest city (which I had nearly stopped playing because of the annoying frame rate and delays), the scrolling is totally smooth, I don't have to wait on dialogs, and it loads in a fraction of the time it used to.

I should reiterate how annoying this whole thing was. To have done nothing at all wrong and to suddenly have the system not work at all is unbelievably frustrating. In all our expectations of reliability, remember that someday your computer could just quit working--yet another reason to have backups and have some sort of plan for how to keep working if your computer suddenly fails.

I uploaded four screenshots of SimCity 4 (in the city I was talking about) so you can see how the graphics take some oomph to be displayed properly. Note that this is only medium detail, too.
http://snipurl.com/v1nmy

--
Soren "scorchgeek" Bjornstad
http://www.thetechnicalgeekery.com

Microsoft is not the answer.
Microsoft is the question.
The answer is "No."

Copyright 2010 Soren Bjornstad.
Verbatim copying and redistribution of part or all of this work
is permitted, provided this notice is preserved.