A month ago without any prior warning the network card on my PC just got fried. Replacing it with a spare network card and PC was back to normal. It got me wondering what happened to it? Could it be that I installed it too close to the AGP card and the cooling fan on the AGP card is blowing hot air from the AGP chip directly to the chip on the network card? Or is my newly assembled PC table having a cooling problem? Or this or that and after a while life went on as normal though the dead network card was still lying next to my monitor.

Then two weeks ago a web host I just signed up suddenly gone invisible on the net. An email from the web host said that due to some member launching spam attack from their web server and given them a bad reputation as the source of spamming. ICANN had blamed them as the source of spamming and taken down their Domain name. This means that even if their server was still working but they had lost their Internet address and no one was able to reach them. Users who host on them but using individual registered Domain are not affected, those affected are users who use the web host sub domain name. They also set up a Temporary Forum for member and user to keep the communication open and to inform of their struggle to regain their Domain name from ICANN. As a member I took part in the Forum and for several days checking on the progress and voicing my opinion as well. Then one evening while on the Forum my PC just hang and upon reboot the PC complaint it can’t find my hard disk!!

The next day after checking the hard disk and confirmed that the hard disk had gone so got a new hard disk from the PC shop. After physically installing the new hard disk and getting ready to go through the OS installation and Software restore… ALAMAK! this time the PC refused to see any visitors, it didn’t recognise any hard disk or floppy disk, it just stop after checking the ram on the motherboard!! This time the matherbaord had gone!!! Within a month the network card gone, the web host gone, the hard disk gone and the motherboard gone!!!!

Next come shopping time for motherboard. Checking on the Internet it looked as if I had a wide option for the type of motherboard that will fit my need. However, that was on the cyber space and when coming back to the real world you had the problem of stock availability and vendors were more interested in selling what they wanted to sell rather than what you wanted to buy. Looked like I didn’t have much choice after walking round the whole LowYet Plaza and finally found what will almost fulfill my needs.

Next, installed the motherboard and all other components. This operation is as good as building a new PC. First you need to move all components from your old motherboard to the new motherboard. The first component is of course the CPU chip and the heat sink. The chip moved without any problem and then came the heat sink and fan - the mounting bracket for the heat sink is made of plastic and guess what? The bracket broke and so back to the shop and I showed the sales assistant the bracket and asked if they had one. They laughed and said ?mei de jiu? or ?no cure? in mandarin and the only cure was to buy a new heat sink fan combo, what choice do I have?

Now I had everything set up and ready to install the OS and restore the software. The problem for this project just seemed endless. After installing the OS and the next step was to install the driver for the motherboard chip set. The driver CD-Rom from the motherboard refused to install and complained that they don’t support my OS and I had to upgrade the OS!! Can you believe them? I didn’t so I checked on the chip set manufacturer website and found they had support for OS even two versions lower than what I am using. The motherboard manufacturer is clearly trying to take the easy way out to cut cost. After all most of the driver software are from the chip manufacturer and all they need is just customise it to their motherboard. I definitely will avoid this motherboard manufacturer the next time if I had a choice. So downloaded the driver from the chip maker and started installing it on my PC. This turned out to be another exercise as the driver is not customise for the said motherboard so several trial and error and reinstallation before everything worked. I also had to disable the on board sound card and reinstall my old SB sound card as I can’t find any working driver for the on board sound card. Oh I also replaced the power unit for my PC as all that happenings made me belive that the power unit was the prime suspect. I think that is a good advice coming from many years of experience in handling various equipment maintenance. Besides the PSU is not expensive compared to other components in the PC.

After everything is back to normal the first thing I did was check out the status on the web host. My PC is finally back in operation about an hour ago and when I arrived at the forum at the web host I was told the web hosts Domain name is back in business also about an hour ago!! BINGO

This entry was posted on Monday, June 2nd, 2003 at 11:39 pm and is filed under General.