Well in the latest fatal blow to the global PC giants such as Dell, IBM etc, today I mercilessly cannibalized the old Compaq and with the skill and dexterity of a world famous brain surgeon, transplanted them into the innards of the Hermes.
And of course they don’t work.
The organs in question are a MSI FX5900 graphics card and a Creative CT4760 sound card coupled with a Live Drive front box.
All was well at first, but after a few moments the whole system froze; no error messages, just a non-functioning moue and keyboard. Couldn’t even use ALT-CTRL-DEL to reboot; had top use the reset button.
I haven’t loaded any drivers for these cards; I rather assumed that Win XP SP2 would be able to handle them without any 3rd party software.
Second time round all seemed well; running the monitor off the graphics port rather than the motherboard on, and was hearing sound through headphones connected to the Live Drive bay.
So I installed Office 2003 without incident.
Restarted; froze again. And again. Went into BIOS and loaded failsafe defaults. Froze again. Disabled on board sound in BIOS. Still failed.
Seeing as this only has happened since I bunged in the cards from the old system, it would seem elementary, would it not Watson, that it is one of these components which is the culprit? But which one?
Disconnected the sound card and rebooted. No freeze. While the going was good I used the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard and my 128 MB dongle (oo-er madam) to set up Favourites and some settings on Hermes. So the back USB slots, or at least one them, is working.
Maybe it’s the PCI slot and not the card itself which is causing the hang? Reinstalled the sound card into another PCI slot. The fault recurs.
Disconnected the Live Drive bay. Fault recurs. So it is definitely the sound card which is arguing with Windows.
In the old days of course you would give the whole thing a bloody good kicking and let it know who was the boss. And it’d thank you for it, and not give any more trouble.
Nowadays though, in this era of Political Correctness Gone Mad, the Computer Social workers would be battering down the front door before you could say Ribbon Connector, would throw you in the back of the van and take the PC into care. Bastards!
So I tenderly withdrew the soundcard and re-enabled onboard sound. I can either leave it like this or try the older CT4830 which is now in the Compaq. I don’t think that will connect with the Live Drive bay though.
Looking back at my Compaq log (yes, I really am that anal) I see I had major probs with the card when I put it in the Compaq, and eventually ended up doing a factory restore to get it working.
The Creative bulletin board is quite informative. There a few mentions about this issue from People Like Us, (I am assuming that if you have come this far with me that You, Too, are a Computer Nerd) and one in particular seems to suggest a couple of ways round the problem.
However, I think I am quite close to hooking the Hermes up to the broadband thingy at which point it will become The Computer and the Compaq will be relegated to the dining room table, where it will lie helplessly on its side while more files and components are plundered form its depths.
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