Miserable failure

[davidn]

To summarize:

• Installing the new graphics card still just gives the "video failure" POST beep


• This means that either the graphics card is just dead (not totally unheard of) or the problem is the connection on the motherboard


• So it's likely I'll need a new motherboard


• The Socket 939 motherboards that my CPU fits into have been obsolete since three years ago


• So I could hunt around for an older one, or just take the opportunity to upgrade


• New CPU as well, then


• Transferring my main hard drive into an external enclosure reveals that it's having some sort of trouble spinning up


• Bugger

I do have a small number of backups on another drive - CT2 is mostly still around as it was near the end of last year, for example, though the source file for the demo isn't (so if I do release it this weekend, everyone's getting the Clickteam version!) But with things like this happening every time I say I'm going to start work on it again, I frankly get the feeling that it's time to take the hint.

Comments

[starfishchris.livejournal.com]

You made sure to plug in the additional power connector to the card, I assume?

My 939 board only had an AGP socket, so I didn't even have the luxury of a decent graphics card when I got it. Which I wasn't overly fussed about, since I cared more about getting a multicore CPU in the future than I did over faster graphics.

On the plus side, you'll really appreciate the difference of having more than one processor. Proper simultaneous multitasking is a lovely thing.

[davidn]

I did - it certainly appeared to all be connected up right (and the card is absolutely titanic - it was a bit of an effort moving everything around to accommodate it!) I might phone their support line in the evening and see if they think it's worth sending a replacement.

I suppose I can get a suantum of quolace in the fact that I'll be effectively getting a new computer - I just need to hunt down a CPU, motherboard and case (hopefully a bigger one) that agree with each other and my power supply.

Good news, the hard drive still apparently works - just not in that enclosure for some reason. I'm not sure why.

[davidn]

Actually, regarding sockets - my 939 board has something that it called an MGP socket, or Machspeed Graphics Port, that I've never heard of anywhere else. It said that it was compatible with AGP graphics cards, so I kept my old one, which naturally failed to get any recognition whatsoever. I think they just stuck an AGP-shaped bit of plastic on to it and left it at that.

[kjorteo]

And that whole process would be how my video card acting weird turned into a whole new system, and was thus how Mercury was born! I think the only original parts Mercury has are the sound card and the storage drawer (easily the most reliable and least failure-prone part of the machine!)

[davidn]

It looks like it's a sign to just upgrade everything :) When did all that happen to you? I vaguely recall seeing the image before, but... what exactly am I looking at, for it to produce that sort of pattern (and still be in a screen-shottable state?)

The drawer is a wonderful idea - there's a lot of 5.25" space in computer cases that just never gets used!

[kjorteo]

I can't remember the time frame, honestly.

What you're looking at is perhaps the strangest computer issue I've ever seen, and it completely baffled both my other computer-literate friends as well. (To this day, none of us are 100% sure how it worked, other than "either the video card or motherboard was on its way out and acting strangely, and replacing the video card the motherboard the entire machine except the sound card and storage drawer seems to have fixed it.")

I was getting issues sort of like stuck pixels on the monitor, where one specific pixel in one specific place would get stuck a certain color. However--and here's the strange thing--the color produced by the stuck pixel then became part of the actual image as soon as it was generated. So, let's say you have a blue pixel somewhere. If you scroll the page down, then the blue pixel that was already generated is considered part of the page you're scrolling and moves up, while that one specific pixel that generated it in the first place is still acting up and making more blue in that one area...therefore, the end result is to basically create a blue line starting from that position and moving however it's scrolled.

Because people wouldn't believe an issue as weird as that existed when I described it to them, I made this. I started by displaying a pure black image (with the stuck pixels over it) and taking a screenshot. Since the generated pixels counted as part of the image, they actually showed up in the screenshot. So I pasted the screenshot and zoomed in to absurdly close levels (that's what those giant blocks in the middle are--pixels from my first screenshot zoomed in!) and, naturally, the stuck pixels were still there on this zoomed-in view, so I then moved the screen around to make a >o_o< face (private reference) out of all the stuck pixel generators like some sort of weird Etch-a-Sketch made out of malfunctioning video cards, and took another screenshot (capturing that plus the zoomed-in pixel blocks from the first screenshot) and that's what you now see before you.