Damned computer gremlins plus my own stupidity=anoying day (lame)

The BBQ Pit
1

I spent half the day today trying to build a new computer. Well mostly assembling and re-assembling it, trying to figure out why the screen was totally blank on startup. After swapping out graphics cards, memory sticks, hard drives, and still getting nothing at all but a few working fans, I figured I had a bad part, and started taking everything apart to ship it back to the supplier.

When I noticed that I didn’t have the 12 volt 4 pin connector to the motherboard connected! :smack: :smack: :smack: I had shoved it up inside, and it had gotten lost behind the other power cables.

Now that my own stupidity was out of the way, I finished putting everything together, turned on power, and again the screen was blank. Only now the BIOS was beeping constantly. Well at least it was progress. I went from a blank screen and no noise to a blank screen and an anoying noise.

Searching around, I found that symptom was likely bad memory. So I took out one of the memory sticks. Had the same symptoms. Took that one out, put in the other one. Same thing again. Finally in frustration I took the memory that was in the bottom slot and placed it in the top slot. Success! WTF? I turned off the computer, and put the other memory stick in, now it works fine. Apparently the computer gremlins like their RAM only in certain configurations. :confused:

Now I remember why I don’t like putting PCs together.

2

I did something very similar to this! Spent hours trying to figure out why the PC I had just put together wouldn’t boot.

Finally looked on the back of the power supply and discovered I had knocked it over to the 220 setting by accident.

:smack:

3

We bought a forty year old house, and we are upgrading one room at a time. Most of the electrical outlets are functional, but the plugs are loose in them, so as we finish each room we replace all the outlets and switches. We just finished re-painting the dining room, and my husband spent three hours yesterday trying to get the first of the new outlets to work. He got to the point of adding to my “to-do” list “hire electrician to repair dining room outlets” when he discovered that two of the outlets in the dining room are on the same circuit as the kitchen outlets and when the power was switched off at the breaker box the GFI tripped. Once he reset the GFI, the outlet worked just fine. We have now added to my list “check lights and outlets and figure out what the circuits in this house are”.