And Now, For Something Moderately Different...

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Odd thing happened to me last night.

The processor’s fan in our PC is less than top shelf quality. Every so often, it gets loud. No, let me rephrase that.

It gets LOUD.

So, every so often, I have to open up the tower, pull the fan out, oil up the bearing, and smack the whole thing back together. Basic maintenance, because I’m too lazy/forgetful/scatterbrained/medicated to ever remember that I need to pick up a new fan when I’m out and about.

I go through this every other week, or so. It’s so routine to me that I don’t really think about what I’m doing. Maybe it’s my personal form of zen. Whatever.

Fan was drowning out the CD I was listening to last night as I browsed these very boards. I got sick of listening to it, shut down the system, did my little ritual, but…
For the very second time ever* I decided to power up the system with the tower still open, to make sure I’d done all this properly. And, of course, the fan didn’t make a single revolution. Not a whisp of air was disturbed in any form by my dinky little poor-man’s heat sink. So I quick stabbed the power off, before the BIOS could get around to looking for a HD/OS. Re-checked my work, and discovered, to my mild astonishment, that I’d plugged the fan’s power cord in upside down. A quick fiddle with plug and socket, et voila, all better. Closed up the case, went on with my evening’s reading.

So why the hell did I doublecheck myself? Was it a subconcious QA guy lurking in the back of my skull who noticed something I hadn’t? Dunno. But it was passing strange, even if only mildly so.

So, with that, I ask, anyone else? Some niggling little voice ever cause you to do something outside your normal routine, either to your gain, or at the least, in avoidance of some “bad thing” that could’ve happened, but you avoided?

[sub]* I doublechecked m’self the very first time I did this, on a completely different PC, which wasn’t even mine. And was always confident enough after that that I did it right every time; since I’ve never been faced with a self-rebooting PC, I’m thinking I got it right every other time.[/sub]

2

I installed a new CD-RW in my computer Friday night. Put everything back together, turned on the computer and got a message:

BOOT DISK ERROR, INSERT BOOT DISK

Uh oh. Search through all the CD’s that came with the computer, no boot disk. Tried the Windows ME disk, nothing. Tried the CD that came with the CD-RW, nothing. Powered down, removed cover and took a look inside.

I had uplugged the power to the hard drive to gain access to the motherboard and forgot to plug it back in. :smack:

Plug in the hard drive, install cover, power up and compter works. Except for one thing. Computer does not see new CD-RW. Power down, remove cover and looked inside.

The ribbon wire was not plugged into the motherboard. :smack:

Plugged in ribbon wire to motherboard, install cover, power up and now computer see new CD-RW. All right, now all I need is a blank CD-R. Forgot to buy some with the new CD-RW. :smack: I then went to bed.

3

skeezix, that was your sub con. “something’s not right.” alarm.

always listen to it.

4

In earlier times, we would never put the covers back on a computer (minicomputers, before PCs) after doing any kind of hardware fiddle. Doing so would interfere with performing what we called the “smoke test:” power it up, and spend a minute or so peering intently into the box. No smoke? Great. Now you can put the covers back on!

5

I once put a stick of 512 MB in a mobo backwards, and fried the chip and the mobo. I triple check when i install ram anymore… Quite embarrasing, i tell ya…

6

Anytime I’m ever having trouble falling asleep, the first thing I do is check my alarm clock. Nine times out of ten, I haven’t set it to the right time, or I’ve forgotten to turn it on. After properly setting it, I invariably fall asleep within minutes.

7

racer72: See, this is an example of not listening to the warning bells… When that little voice told you to stay in bed all day, y’really should’ve listened. :wink:

[sub]Don’tcha just want to put your foot through something on a day like that?[/sub]