Scribblings from the Mitchy Side

So naturally, on a Sunday after the shops have closed and before a week in which I am a) working 9-5 and b) having a new bathroom installed, my desktop PC decides to blow a gasket. *headdesks forever* I'm assuming the motherboard has gone at this point as it just went dead in mid-use but didn't power down and refused to let me switch it off at all. On the off chance it was just temporary overheating, I took the cover off and went at it with the ol' compressed air but it was still DoA when I tried switching it back on later. I'll try once more tomorrow, when its had a full 24 hours plus to cool off, and if it's still dead, will assume motherboard is fried and buy a replacement. *whimpers*

Why now, Fate, when I'm shelling out money like confetti on the bathroom, hmm? HMM?!? *glares*

In the meantime, thank allllllllll the gods for laptops and routers that are straightforward to use. *cuddles her internet*

(Added annoyance: the laptop's due for repair - battery fails to hold a charge any more- and I was going to take it in this week. Oh well at least the PC blew BEFORE I'd taken the laptop in, that really would have added insult to injury. Just hope I can get the laptop sorted before I go away in August)

PS: Is swapping out a motherboard hard? Can a semi-technical me handle it do you think, oh wise flist?

PPS: Hope to heck I can figure out what motherboard I had. I think I put the specs in LJ somewhere......*offers up prayers to patron saint of dormice*

I'm told my baby compy lives and has been running happily for several hours now with nary a noise or a BSoD. So we'll see. The other good news is that it's under warranty until the end of this month so if there are problems, hopefully I'll know about it soon enough to get it fixed for nuffink.

Compy died in a new and interesting fashion last night. It switched itself off while I was in mid-internet browse. "Umm," I thought, "that's not good!" It has been blisteringly hot in my lounge and it was making a bit of noise so I took the case off and cleaned off the fans. The box inside was seriously hot, too hot to touch. I ulped. Put everything back together and switched it on - nuffink. Totally dead.

So I left it until this morning, figuring 12 hours to cool down completely wouldn't hurt and tried it this morning. Lo! It turned on! Blue power light, gentle humming from the box. BUT - I have no power to the peripherals - no keyboard, no monitor, no mouse, no modem *boggles* If it was the motherboard, I wouldn't have thought it would have switched on at all? Likewise if there was a problem with the power supply. Hrm. Anyway, the really good news is as far as I know it's still under warranty (it was bought at the end of last July), and I will phone PC World at lunchtime and check that if I take it over to the Stevenage store and wail at them, it'll get fixed.

Now I have a very shiny laptop and, had I been able to find my modem set up cd, I could have had internet connectivity last night. But for the first time in forever, the set up cd was nowhere to be found. Isn't it bloomin' always the way? *headdesks* So until the box gets fixed/replaced or I find the set up cd, I will be internet-less from home for the duration. And while I can access LJ/FB from work, I can't get to email, so no email for meeeeee for a while. If you need me, I'm clinging to my mobile more than usual :D (Note to self: get a damn iPhone!!)

My new computer, it is very shiny. But I've hit two major, major snags. First know that I have now installed XP (from a licenced MS OS disk) and that the first problem existed in both Vista and XP but the second is a "since the reinstall" problem.

Snag the first: BAHLEETED - doccy fixed! Yay!

Snag the second: BAHLEETED - doccy fixed! Yay!

Otherwise, I am very happy with the new box. I watched two tv shows and some YouTube videos yesterday and it didn't crash once! \o/ Joy to the mousey :)

Compy died. A friend opened it up to put in some more memory and the motherboard reacted by falling over with a sound roughly like "Acccck". Luckily said friend has spare compy which I'm currently using and which has my hard drive installed so I'm not bereft and PC-less. *petses the friend*

Went up to PC World, found a perfect replacement ...and it's out of stock. Gits. Gotta wait until maybe Wednesday. Bah. *sulks*

Also now need to sell or try and get the money back for the new hard drive/2 gig of RAM I bought to upgrade the Ex-PC. Should be able to get the money back on the RAM, still have the receipt for that, and it's still sealed into its packs so hopefully that won't be a problem.

Have a splitting headache, partly due to peering at spreadsheets all day, partly due to wacky sleep patterns yesterday and possibly due to lack of food. The latter two are easily cured, fortunately.

And I still have shiny Leverage DVDs to watch, so all is not completely made of suck :)

So the PC finally died horribly today, dammit. Badly enough that the only thing I could do was a complete reinstall - thank all the gods I had recovery discs.

It's working, I'm using it as I type, but now I have to go through the pain of restoring stuff like bookmarks, music, games etc. I've lost a lot of stuff again, because I still don't have external back ups in place but there we go. Thank all the gods, my pic of me with Idina is stored in about five places, so that's something :)

On the plus side, the PC's been a PoS since I got it and probably needed a re-install anyway. We'll see if it actually behaves any better now. I just know I'm going to spend the rest of the week remembering stuff I've lost and going "ARgh!". Really, really must make getting an external hard drive or other back up source a priority when I have spare pences :P

So, how was everyone else's Sunday?

Stupid computers. Hates them, hates them precioussssss.

OK, maybe I just hate this one :p

My copy of AVG Free stopped working. I uninstalled and tried re-installing it from the file I originally installed it from. It's corrupted, says my PC, bugger off and find another download! So I did. And every.single.one refuses to install. Good grief, they can't all be corrupted! *glares at PC*

So I rummaged and tried another free virus program - and that misfired so badly it took me 15 minutes and 3 reboots to uninstall it! It kept finding a virus called something like XPACK -SR/something.XPACK and kept finding it, over and over and over and over and over again. So I'd keep getting the alert box telling me "Look Mummy, look what I've found!" which buggered everything up nicely and meant it was a pain in the arse getting anything else to run.

I've got it uninstalled now but clearly I have a virus and, it would seem to me, it's fubar'ing my anti-virus downloads. Can anyone recommend another free anti-virus program? Something a tad more robust?

There are technical gremlins standing between a Mitchy and her baseball. This is Not A Good Thing. The situation is as follows:-

I have a subscription to mlb.com which lets me watch live baseball games on my compy. This has been working quite happily until yesterday, when my browser was playing merry havoc and kept crashing. Finally, the PC also crashed, possibly in sympathy. When I eventually got rebooted and sorted, I could no longer view the baseball.

The way it works is, I click on a link on mlb.com next to the game I want to watch and a new window opens, where I log in with my registration info. I then get taken to the player window, with the game playing in a resizeable window. The embedded player is Windows Media Player. Now what happens is I go through all of that still but at the end all I get is a black screen and the usual player options. No sound, no pic, nuffink. Right clicking brings up a list of menu options one of which is "Error Details" and what this is telling me is the following:-

Windows Media Player cannot play the file because the specified protocol is not supported. If you typed a URL in the Open URL dialog box, try using a different transport protocol (for example, "http:" or "rtsp:").

Help! I have no idea what to do to convince it it's the same bloody file type it's been playing quite happily for a couple of years :P

ETA: And we have lift off again. I upgraded Windows Media Player, meticulously combed mlb.com and found a FAQ that was actually useful, made sure my player settings were what they should be and rebooted. Seems to work now! Yay!!

Techie types - is there an easy way of getting at what's in a PC's cd-rom drive when the bloody thing refuses to open? I've lost a DVD disc and I'm wondering if it got stuck in the old, dead PC. I've taken the side casing off but got foiled at that point because I don't possess a screwdriver of the right size to assist me in dismantling everything else :P It occurred to me that before I start entertaining ideas of mallets and chisels, I should prolly ask here first :)

I have been a lazy LJ-er and not updated in ages. Bad Mitchy, no biscuit. I will update later.

However, now I must lug my useless crashing New!PC to PC World and find out if it's repairable or if I bought an Edsel.

The good news is my Win98 box still works *beams* So at least I won't be incommunicado for who knows how long.

Right, off I go!