I stepped out of my apartment this morning to discover a box of computer motherboards on my doorstep.

Literally!


Five new boards have been contributed to the cause by someone I have never met, who had a few boards that he was going to toss out if no one took them. Well, I happened to want them, so they wound up with me. Free!
The board on top in the picture was acquired earlier in the week, but the four beneath are new, plus one more off-camera.

A couple of the boards had CPUs in them. There was a Pentium 150 MHz CPU on one of the boards. It turns out that was the only board (that I could test) that worked. But there is no heat sink or fan. All I need now is a Socket 7 heat sink and fan and I'll be all set. Seems like there are a lot of Socket 7 boards around. Anyway, two of the five "new" boards had sockets I hadn't seen before, and no CPUs. One was a Socket 462 and the other was a PGA370 - whatever that is. They were also ATX boards and I haven't figured out how to get the power to turn on, yet, for ATX boards on my bench test setup. But it was moot since I had no CPUs for those boards. So, they are officially in the artwork pool.

One of the CPUs that was on one of the remaining three boards was a Pentium MMX 233 MHz - exactly like one I got on another board last week. And, just like the other one, it was missing the cable that plugs into the fan (the heat sink and fan is built-in on that CPU). In fact, it is the same CPU that is on the board that I am now using to burn BIOSes. So, now I have a direct drop-in replacement CPU for that board if, for some reason, the CPU dies. I also found another 32 MB of RAM that works, so the BIOS burning board is populated with 48 MB of RAM, now. Not that it needs it. But at least I know where to find the RAM if I need it on another board.

The board with the PGA370 CPU socket would be great as a BIOS burner, because it is a very small board (relatively). It only has one ISA slot and one PCI slot...and it has the 32-pin flash ROM socket for the BIOS. It has a very unusual slot on the board with some kind of support brackets. I have never seen this before. Look!



Very strange. It might be for some kind of riser board, or possibly a bus extender (I have one somewhere I should dig out - it was one of my recent acquisitions). I have three other CPUs that I acquired earlier in the week as well that I have yet to identify (i.e. look at) or research to see if one would plug into this PGA370 socket. That would be great if I have something that will work.

In the end, however, I think most of these boards are officially part of the artwork pool to draw upon for non-functional applications. I already scavanged two BIOS flash ROM chips to add to my available flash memory pool. One of them is a 256K chip (all the others so far have been 128K). I'm anxious to see if I can come up with a PIC project that I could use them in.

I also dug through some other stuff under my bench where I already have a big case of printed circuit boards that have been waiting for an art project for some time. Chris is jazzed about making some kind of art piece out of them, so we are really trying to clean out all of our unwanted JUNK to make space where we can actually work on something. Anyway, I came across some speakers. The new computer that is going to my friend Dave requires powered speakers, and Dave's old computer does not have powered speakers. The speakers I found were given to me as part of a big box of stuff that came with a Mac that someone gave me a couple years ago. I just need to find a 6V DC power adapter and they're good to go. Those will go to Dave, since I don't need them.



They're the bigger speakers in the picture. The little ones don't work so well. They'll either become part of a testing station or will go to the thrift center.

I also rediscovered some rather large computer speakers that Chris bought a long time ago, but were missing a power adapter (and any info regarding voltage requirements). I decided to take a stab at getting them to work, and discovered they will work at 9V. So, now we can hook those up to our new audio/video system and have some (hopefully) good sound. Or at least good enough for coming straight out of the computer...until we plug it into a real sound system.

Things have been good. I just opened my mail and found a rebate check for a DVD player that we bought a few months ago.

Well, that's about it for today. Oh, yeah - I also picked up a 351 MB laptop hard disk to use with one of my embedded computers. Just something to play with...eventually.

Today I made a copy of the BIOS that is on the main board that I now use for burning BIOSes. But in the process, I ran into the exact same problem as I did when I blew the BIOS on the web server. The floppy disk became corrupted. I am convinced that either there is a virus in the "Caldera Dr. DOS" disk image that I used to create a bootable floppy disk, or the disk image itself was corrupted. Fortunately, today I did not lose the BIOS. The disk corruption occured while I was saving the contents of a BIOS chip to disk. Which, by the way, was the first thing the Award flash utility did under Caldera DOS just before burning (and corrupting) the web server BIOS.

So, two different floppy disks, two different floppy disk drives, two different computers, two different BIOS utilities, same operating system, same problem. Hmm. Gee, I wonder where the problem is? Everything points to Caldera DOS.

I used Windows XP to create a bootable floppy disk, and to no surprise, all BIOS read/write activities from that disk were successful. No problems whatsoever. Except, gee, why does Microsoft take up so much disk space? I think I am going to have to dig up an old MS-DOS disk and just go with straight MS-DOS for doing the BIOS stuff.

Anyway, I spent some time cleaning out the shop today. It's going to be great once I get all the CRAP out of here! Hopefully, that will be soon. I saw some guy on Craig's List looking for electronic stuff for an art project. I scrounged a bunch of stuff together to possibly give to him, although he has not written back to me, yet. But some of this stuff looks like maybe Chris or I would like to use it in OUR computer art project. So, we'll see how much of this CRAP I can actually get rid of.

So the weirdness begins again. My NetZero email box filled up today. So, I decided to empty it. After doing so, NetZero still tells me that my mail box is full...even though there is not a single message to be found. My IN box is empty. My Sent box is empty. My Trash box is empty. My Junk box is empty. So, I guess I just don't use NetZero anymore. So much for their "free email for life" deal that I subscribed to so many years ago. Their email service has been shoddy at best the past few weeks. I think they are discouraging their free accounts. That's pretty stupid if they are doing it deliberately, though, since that's going to eliminate a lot of potential customers. If the free service is that bad, why would I want to subscribe to their premium services?

Absolutely nothing happened today.

...............................................Weird.

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Days like this are truly rare, indeed. Not only did I resurrect both of my dead computers, but I also finally got the audio working again on my shop computer (Dell tech support was no help - I figured it out, myself). And to top it all off, I am now prepared for performing BIOS updates in the event I kill another one in the future. I have a main board (the one I used earlier to restore life to the server) that I can just pull out whenever I need it and plug it in and I've got my BIOS updater/restorer.

I was thinking I might be able to use this method as a low-cost (FREE!) flash programmer for other projects. The beauty of this uniflash utility that I found is that the source code comes with it. I could modify it as needed, if I have some need to program a flash chip for, say, a robotics project.

Hmmm!

Here is a picture of the setup I used to recover my BIOS:


And here is a semi-close-up of the BIOS chip that it runs with (it's the chip with the funny looking AWARD sticker on it):


I am thinking of getting a zero-insertion-force (ZIF) socket to plug into the board to make it easy to swap the chips whenever I do a hot flash. And I have some extra main boards now that don't work, so I could burn a backup BIOS of this board into one of their chips in case I accidentally kill the BIOS of my BIOS burner board. That way I won't lose the ability to burn BIOSes.

Understand?

I'm not sure I do. Anyway, I just tested two other main boards that I picked up today, and they work. They're both old '486 DX 33 MHz boards, so they're not of much use. I wasn't able to test them, earlier, because I didn't have an ISA video card, and these two boards only have ISA slots. But I dug through my boxes and found an ISA video board. I also found another PCI video board. And both video boards work! So, now I have three video boards. Actually, I have three other video boards that are ISA, but they also have a VESA local bus on them. They're not very elegant or useful to me, so they will likely become part of an art project.

But with all these working main boards I have now, it seems kind of a shame to just hang them up somewhere. Seems like I could build something with them. Maybe I will make them functional art pieces. Just plug a serial I/O board in and have them drive some serial devices. Believe me, I have plenty of serial I/O boards.

In fact, I have lots of boards. Look!






I am being overrun with boards! Pretty soon, they'll be coming to take me away, ha ha! To the funny farm, where everything is beautiful.

But not today.

I know, it's late. Time for bed. I hate for days like this to end!

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What an awesome day! Days like this are rare. I must be doing something right.

My web server is back up and running - and I didn't need any help from anyone with a flash/EEPROM programmer to do it. How did I accomplish this magical feat, you ask? Well, I wish I had a picture to show you, but you can visit this web site http://www.uniflash.org to find out what I did.

Basically, from the [free] goodies I got today, there was a motherboard that worked that I used to burn the BIOS for my dead web server box. Hey - maybe the tide is turning! Maybe this mad, mad, mad, mad circus is finally over!

One can only hope.

Turn the page.

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Woo hoo! The universe was good to me today. Thank you, universe!

Not only was I excused from Jury Duty, but I got one of my two dead computers back up and running. Not the web server, yet, but that's my next project.

Here's the deal. I put out a plea on Craig's List for any "scrap" motherboards that people might have and two people came through for me. I got a few more motherboards, and a ton of extra stuff, too. For free! But most of it is junk. Or, well, not very useful. Old computer stuff. But I had a good time plugging things in and seeing what worked and what didn't. I am definitely well-equipped for a computer hardware art project, now!

So, here is a picture of my computer ("Tesla") with the new motherboard in it before I had turned it on, yet. Of course, I tested the motherboard before installing it, so I knew it was at least good enough to attempt a boot-up with it.



I turned it on and, to make a long story short, I got it to boot! I have not plugged in the network or speakers, yet, to see if I have Internet connectivity or sound, but it boots. At one point it asked me to insert the Windows 98 CD to install a driver, but the driver stack didn't yet include IDE, so I was unable to read the CD. Fortunately, I was able to pull an adequate driver off a Windows 95 CAB file directory that was on the hard drive.

Hmm.. Wait a second. If IDE was not up, how did it access the hard drive? That doesn't make sense. It was looking for a PCI/IDE driver. Maybe it was for an IDE channel it found on a PCI card (I know there is one in there). Anyway, I better boot up again to see if I can access the CD-ROM drive at all.

I still have a few more tests to perform, obviously, but it looks good. I can at least put this up with a notice telling people that the web site is down when they try to access it.

Here is a series of images taken during the boot process:


Good BIOS report. I've got 128 MB of RAM in this puppy! Part of today's acquisition!


Checkdisk (scandisk?) started since I had a problem with a driver installation and had to reboot before Windows completely started.


Scandisk report - there was a bad date that I elected not to fix, hence the "Not Fixed" message in the directory structure.


And it's up! The picture is blurry, but so is the monitor, so this is a double whammy.

Once I get my web server back up, I will move the images to it and will update them to large images. Or maybe I won't - you get the idea. They're a little small to look at, and I don't have unlimited space under my Internet provider account.

Anyway, I have another motherboard that looks like it might be a good candidate to attempt a hot flash process to burn a BIOS (a GOOD BIOS) for the web server. I'm going to milk all this good fortune for what it's got. I am afraid if I wait until tomorrow to try, it will be too late. I don't often have days like this.

I'm just having too much fun! Well, I guess I'll run some final tests and plug this baby into the network and put up a "still broken" page in place of the web site.

posted by Bill  # 5:51 PM

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So, I am still looking for ways to resurrect the two computers that died. I picked up some old boards from a guy in San Jose. Two motherboards, a bunch of other miscellaneous cards and drives, an old computer that looked like it had been in a garage for years. Man, I've never seen so much dirt in and on a computer before.

Here is the computer. This is a staged photo that I sent to a friend of mine as a joke, but it is MUCH cleaner in this shot than it was when I got it. I wish I took a picture of it before I cleaned it off. Along with the dust, there were also quite a bit of spider webs inside.



There were a couple of cards plugged into the main board. Here's one of them.



Now that's something you don't want in your computer!

Anyway, I pulled the main board out of the computer - it was surprisingly clean in comparison (mostly because it was mounted vertically). So that gave me a third motherboard that I got from this guy.

So I did some testing and some troubleshooting. I was hoping to find a motherboard to replace the motherboard in the second computer that died (refer to the first entry in this blog). It turns out, I have verified that my motherboard is, indeed, fried. It's not the BIOS chip that is dead. The BIOS in the server is dead, but this other computer has a dead main board.

Of course, none of the three boards I got from this guy were any good. One would have been a perfect replacement for my dead one. But the 64K base memory is dead. And, unfortunately, the memory is surface-mount soldered to the board. No way to recover there. The other two boards didn't have any base memory. It was all socketed chips that someone had removed. They might work if I put some memory in there, but they wouldn't be good replacement boards for the dead computer.

So, I'm still standing on square one. Two dead computers, and a piling heap of new junk to clutter my shop with. I am determined to do something artistic with all these dead boards.

The saga continues...

Tonight was supposed to be the night that I got my BIOS restored on my web server. Of course, that didn't happen. There are a couple of guys at the robotics club who have EEPROM burners that were going to take a shot at putting a good BIOS into my corrupted chip. But, for some reason I don't quite understand, the custodial workers at the school where the club meets are working short hours this week...because of President's Day. HUH?!?! So, there was no one to open the room where the club meets.

So, the club didn't meet, and I didn't get my BIOS updated. Maybe next week.

WE'LL SEE!

So, over the weekend, I had this idea. I took the power supply that died from the server (the event that started all this) and gutted it. I ripped it to shreds and threw away the innards. I thought it would make a nice little casing for a tiny embedded computer. Something to play with.

Well, I had this power supply that I bought from Electronic Goldmine - which is a place that sells surplus electronic parts. It was supposedly brand new - never used. I took this to mean that it worked.

Guess what? Like you have to guess. After quite a few hours of drilling holes and scrounging up stand-offs & cables and soldering wires together to get the power supply to connect to the computer, I turned it on and LO AND BEHOLD it didn't work.

So that blows that whole project. It would have been perfect. But the likelihood of finding another power supply this small is, well, probably zero. Electronic Goldmine is sold out of them.

Drats.

Here is a shot of the power supply casing with the new dead guts inside of it.



And here is the PC/104 form factor embedded computer that was going to go inside.



What a shame. It would have been cool.

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I have moved the naked computer into my shop. It seems computers are ganging up on me these days. I just lost three hours of work yesterday because of something weird. I hit or clicked on something while I was working, which just happened to flash a dialog box on the screen, and the button that appeared right under my mouse pointer as I happened to click at the very same moment, was a "NO" button. It was asking me if I wanted to save my work. So there went three hours down the drain.

In my futility, I didn't want to do anything with computers except perhaps start shoveling them over the balcony. So what did I do, instead? I hauled my magic box and the naked computer into my shop where I wouldn't have to look at it anymore. The fewer the better.



However, these things must be in my blood, because instead of dumping the stuff out of sight and going back into the apartment, I started digging through my box of parts. And I came up with this very large (physically) SCSI hard drive that I had extracted from an old computer years ago (a computer I never used). The drive is not much smaller than the computer mainboard, itself. Out of curiosity, I plugged it into the naked computer (after also digging up the SCSI controller card and cable for it), and guess what?

It worked!

Maybe I should just stick with the old stuff, since it works. I think it just works because it's DOS. No GUI operating system like Windows to muck up the works. Which brings me to my next adventure. But before I get into that, I just wanted to mention that I found a few interesting personal files on that big drive that were left behind by whomever owned the computer before I acquired it. It is a 64 MB hard drive, by the way - an old Seagate.

Anyway, one file on the drive had a list of three or four children (with their addresses and ages), and another file contained a letter to someone, offering to do some preaching in the role of a pastor for a church.

Hmmm.

Another file was a short letter to someone's brother, and a couple of files were references to someone's wonderful grandmother who had taken this person to see the Barnum and Bailey Circus when he or she was a child.

Circus?! CIRCUS??!!! Hey - what a coincidence!

Anyway, after I unplugged the huge drive, I plugged in a physically smaller, but larger in capacity, 1.2GB drive and it had Windows ME on it. I wondered if it would boot, so I let it try. It took over an hour to boot. SEE WHAT I MEAN ABOUT GUI OPERATING SYSTEMS? It was taking way to long to shut down after I finally told it to do so, so I turned off the power.

I won't try to boot that again.

So, it took me going back to an old '486 [naked] computer for me to do use things I have never used before: a SCSI hard drive, and Windows ME. Not that there is any relevance to that in the universal scheme of things. I just thought it was interesting, even if you don't.

I had a thought today. I know, that's pretty scary. But being without a web server was bugging me, and it really bugged me that I was without a web server only because I didn't have a particular set of ones and zeroes programmed into a read-only memory chip. ARGH! So, desperation called for desperate thoughts.

I wondered if it was possible to burn a flash ROM for one motherboard by using another motherboard. I did a little digging, and lo and behold, some desperate techie person had the same idea I had quite a few years ago. There is a hot flash utility that will allow me to do this. The problem is, I need a working computer to try it on.

The other computer that I killed would have been perfect to try this on. But, since it is dead, that left me extremely desperate, so I took other measures.

I got out my magic box.

My magic box consists of bits and pieces of old computers - motherboards (of the '486 variety), serial cards, video cards, ethernet cards - cards out the wazoo! I wondered if the motherboards were too old to have programmable BIOS chips in them. One is definitely too old (it has a genuine EPROM on it - with the UV erase window and all). But at least one of the other motherboards has an EEPROM on it. I couldn't find the datasheet on it, no matter how deep I dug on the Web, so I know it is old. It has a 27C part number, which made me think it was an EPROM, but it also has the programming voltage printed right on the chip, so I know it is electrically programmable. It also has the same number of pins as the BIOS on my dead server, but I don't know if the pinout is compatible or even if it can be programmed with the flash utility I have (it doesn't have this chip listed among the supported chips, so probably not).



Anyway, I just thought it was cool that I assembled a working '486 (100 MHz) computer on my desk top. No case - just the motherboard with a video card, a multi I/O card (with no disk drives attached -- yet), power supply and a keyboard and monitor.

It works just fine!

I suppose I could put together a really slow web server with it. Maybe another time.

By the way, a new theory as to why my other computer died was that I think I may have plugged the power supply connecters in the wrong way - plugging P8 into where P9 should have gone, and P9 into where P8 should have gone. That would have put 12V where only 5V would have been happy. A definite possibility.

Also, after assembling a computer on my desk, I never got to try the hot flash utility after all. I don't know if it will work, I don't think it will work, and I'm not going to kill another computer in the process. SO THERE!

The antics abound at the Hubbard household as a new member is inducted into the great circle of computers that dictate the direction and purpose of those who own them.

This document chronicals one eventful evening (of February 7, 2004) as the new computer was being prepared for the purpose it is to fulfill in the days to come.

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This first image portrays a view of the workplace in the wake of the events that transpired earlier in the evening. Even in this static state, the image captures a perspective that is indicative of the earlier chaos that livened the room on this eventful evening.

This view only shows half the room. My half. Chris's half is not visible. You'll see her side later on, but her half is not very important to the story, since all the activity occurred on my side.

There's really not much to the story, actually. It is really more of a visual experience, which is why I thought it would be amusing to put this page together. Just the sudden realization that I was sitting in a room amidst a plethora of computers, and contemplating the history of my life that it represented, compelled me to compile this page and to share a bit of that history with you.

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Here is where I spend much of my time. This is my perch. Whether I am working or playing, this is where I sit. And I have two computers to choose from at this station - either my laptop or my desktop computer.

The monitor has two inputs that can be selected from a switch on the front of the monitor. Therefore, I can use the same monitor for both computers without having to switch cables. I need the monitor for the laptop, since the laptop is ergonomically hostile.

The laptop is what I am using when I am on ICQ. I also have ICQ on my workshop computer (not shown in this series), so you can rest assured that I am either on my laptop or in my shop when I am seen on ICQ. My desktop computer is where all my music is, currently. At least all the music files I have been able to find. The keyboard is cumbersome to use when I have the laptop set up, since the laptop sits where the desktop keyboard normally sits.

The desktop computer is the tail end of the lineage of computers that I have had up to this point. It contains all the files that I have carried over from my past. All my weird thoughts, creations and ideas. If it dies, I'll probably die with it.

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This is what all the hoopla has been about the past few days (and especially this particular evening). It arrived in pieces in two big boxes on Friday, February 6, shortly after Noon. I spent nearly three hours assembling the components into the chassis.

Currently, it contains the following components:
- ABIT IS7 motherboard with a Pentium 4 2.6GHz processor
- 1GB of RAM
- Two 120 GB hard drives for software and data
- ATI Radeon 9600XT graphics card with 128 MB of memory
- CD-ROM player/burner
- DVD-ROM player/burner (can also burn CDs)
- Creative Audigy 2 sound card with face plate (audio connectors in front)

A guy came over to install audio production software on the computer and to show Chris how to use it. This computer will be used for our music and video production activities.
There is a smaller monitor, barely & partially visible in the top right corner of the image that is used on the web server where rcnightflying.com lives. We originally used this monitor on the new computer during the installation of the operating system. But we got to a point where the video would disappear. After two hours of work, we decided Microsoft was at fault and started over! The problem happened again, so we decided to try a different monitor. Video reappeared. After all that, it turned out the monitor we were using was too old and was not supported by the video driver. UGH!

So I went out to my shop and extracted the monitor from that computer and brought it in. That is the monitor in this view. It worked fine and we were able to use it to complete the software installation.

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This is the computer that runs the web server. It is an older machine running Fedora (the latest incarnation of Linux). It has a P5BV3+ motherboard with a 400MHz AMD K6 processor and 512 MB of RAM. That is, if I am reading the numbers correctly. That doesn't make sense, since the motherboard specs indicate that the maximum memory capacity is 384 MB. Hmmm. Well, it is a moot point at this point, anyway, since the server is currently dead. However, at the time this picture was taken, it was alive and well...after dying once already from another cause.

During the setup of the new computer, I discovered that the web server had rebooted at some point. I knew this, because I had inadvertently left the Linux installation disk in the CD-ROM drive and when I plugged the monitor back into the server (after using it on the new box) I noticed the installer was prompting me to continue. Instead, I removed the CD and rebooted and restarted the web server and all was well.

However, after spending hours getting the new computer up and running, we were taking a break and considering calling it a night. All of a sudden, the lights went out on one side of the upper level of our apartment. As did all of the computers. Except for Chris's (hers was plugged into a separate circuit). This happened close to 11:00 p.m.

My laptop escaped the black-out without a hitch because of its battery, but my desktop computer shut down, the new computer shut down, and the web server shut down. There was nothing lost on the computers, but on further inspection, it became suspect that it was perhaps the power supply in the web server that caused the power to go out as it choked and died. At least that seems the most likely cause and effect, although it is possible that the power outage is what killed the power supply.

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And here is the dead power supply. I happened to have yet another old relic of a computer (I think it is another AMD K6 machine, that ran at 233 MHz when it ran). It had a good power supply in it, and it happened to be what the web server needed, so I performed transplant surgery on the two machines, and now the web server has the power supply that used to be in the other machine. Within an hour, I had the web server back up and running. However, the fan was making noise, so I figured I would remove the good fan from the dead power supply and perform fan transplant surgery on the transplanted power supply at some point in the future.

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And here is the trusty donor computer. Not only has it donated its power supply to the web server, but it has also donated its floppy drive to the new computer. It is a perfectly good, functional computer otherwise. I am looking for a replacement power supply for the web server so I can put the power supply back into this computer, and am also going to get another floppy drive so the computer can be whole again. I don't know what I will use this computer for (it is a bit slow), but I might set it up with a clean installation and sell it or give it to someone in need or put it to good use. As it is, it might wind up replacing the web server, as I may have no luck getting a new BIOS for it.

Oh, yeah - I never said what I did that finally killed the web server. Ahem. Well, it went like this. In the process of writing this web page, on the day after the power supply died, I discovered I did not remember what motherboard and processor was in the web server. So, I opened up the computer case to look. I noted the motherboard was a P5BV3+ (revision C1), so then I looked up the motherboard information on the web, and discovered there was a BIOS update for it. One thing led to another, and I decided on a whim to update the BIOS.

Bad move.

The first part of the update performed a backup of the current BIOS. Afterward, during the actual update, the screen went suddenly dark and the computer beeped. One long beep followed by two short beeps. A beep code that is not even listed in the troubleshooting section of the motherboard manual.

What a surprise.

In the process of the BIOS update going awry, it also bit the floppy disk, making it inaccessable. So much for a backup. And even if I had a backup, I have no way to burn it into the chip, since the computer no longer boots.

So now my only hope is to either get a replacement BIOS chip from the motherboard manufacturer (fortunately, they have an office in San Jose), or I have to find someone who can burn a good BIOS back into my chip for me.

Good luck!

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Here is the other side of the room, where Chris sits. Computers are accumulating at her workstation now. This picture was taken when the new computer was still in the process of being brought to life, so the big monitor on the left was not being used at the time. However, as you will see later, it is now being used as the monitor for the new box.
The keyboard and mouse were scavanged from my shop computer. At least for the time being. I guess I won't be using my shop computer for a while...although I have no shortage of mice and keyboards now.

Read on.

When I took this picture, I thought the worst was over. When I began writing this page, I thought the worst was over. Little did I know I would soon find myself in sheer computer hell.

As I mentioned, I attempted to update the BIOS in the web server and wound up killing that computer. Well, to add salt (a lot of salt!) to the wound, I decided I was going to be smart and do a little experiment. I decided to pull the BIOS chip from the donor computer and put it into the web server computer to see if it would work. I figured it wouldn't, but was worth a try, because the worst that could happen would be that it wouldn't work and I'd put the chip back into the donor computer and everything would be fine.

YEAH RIGHT!

That is the last time I will use a part from a good, working computer in order to fix an ailing one. Excuse my French, but fuck that! It's not worth it.
When you can understand just what I have been through with computers for the last 26 years, it comes as absolutely no surprise that I would utter the "F" word when describing this particular weekend. Yes, it started as a bad day and turned into a really bad weekend. It's a wonder I am not far more liberal with that familiar four-letter word. It is indeed time for a change in career.

Anyway, you see, the thing is, after I put the BIOS chip back into the donor computer, I proclaimed the web server computer officially dead. So, I decided to replace it with the donor computer. I did a reverse transplant, pulling the power supply out of the web server and putting it back into the donor computer. Since I knew the donor computer worked, I figured I would simply reassemble it, plug it in, turn it on, copy the web site files to it, and I'd be done.

To my utter dismay, when I turned on the computer, I got nothing. The power supply fan came on, and the disk drives powered up, but there was no video. No beeps. No indication whatsoever that the motherboard was alive. I have either killed the BIOS chip in that stupid experiment, or this power supply was killed, too. Perhaps the web server motherboard was killed when the other power supply died, causing the replacement power supply to fail. But that doesn't make sense, since the motherboard complained about the other BIOS, which it wouldn't have done if it had no power. So, my diagnosis is that I killed the BIOS chip. So I have two dead computers because of no BIOS.

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Witness the silent aftermath. Note the absense of the web server computer. It is gone for good, I'm afraid, unless a miracle happens. And just for the record, there are no miracles in the land of computers. I think computers come from an opposing camp.
At least I have a place to work now. The clutter is gone. The new computer is now sitting on the floor on the other side of the room. At least the lizard sitting on the (now unused) monitor is still intact.

Even it did not escape without incident, however, as it fell behind the desk during one moment of irritation when the monitor tried to do the same. Of course the monitor didn't get very far, but the lizard required an emergency extraction operation that may be seen on America's Greatest Animal Rescues next week.

I am very afraid right now, however. I am afraid, because I have not turned on my desktop computer since the power went out. Two dead computers in one day is too much to handle. I do not want to find out there is a problem with my desktop computer, too. So, it sits quietly on my desk until I muster up enough courage to push the power button.

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Not much to say about this picture, except that you can see the new computer down on the floor to the far left. That's its home for a while.
Oh, and you can also see Godzilla's feet and tail standing atop the white monitor. Its expression as I observe it while I write this copy seems to capture my feelings regarding this whole stupid weekend.



And here are the two computers that lost their lives in the line of duty. Actually, that's too nice. They failed to perform their duty. So now they sit in limbo, awaiting a final determination of their fate. Junk yard or restoration? What shall it be?
Only time will tell as the saga continues... Stay tuned.

Oh, by the way, now that I finished this web page, I HAVE NO WHERE TO PUT IT! My web server is down! Well, I guess I'll have to put it up under my Internet account.


THE END?

Since computers rule and dictate the course of my life, I thought it was about time that I started writing about them. Kind of an on-line journal or diary - or 'blog, as they are now called. I guess that is short for "web log".

In these pages, you will see...well, you'll see.