Been on half-speed for a few days...

[toprob]

I'm trying to get up to date with all support issues, after some computer problems which showed up when I shifted. If I appear to have missed any queries, please get back to me -- although I flag all support queries, my computer has been crashing constantly and something might have been misplaced.

I had in fact decided yesterday that it was time to upgrade, as I couldn't get the PC to boot at all. This is a long-standing problem, going back six months. Sometimes the PC would just stop working, although the fans would still be running. When I'd restart, it would continually crash, and normally I'd need to remove the graphics card and reset it to get it to boot again.

This time around no amount of fiddling would work, so I was putting together a list of components to buy next month when I should have some money, which was really ear-marked for some household stuff like a fridge:)

I even tried the old method favoured back in my support days -- dropping the PC from 10cms -- but still no joy. Since I couldn't get any work done, and didn't have enough money to fix it yet, I had enough time to think about the problem, and decided that it could be dirty AGP contacts, which would explain why resetting the gaphics card in its slot used to work, so in the end I jammed a screwdriver wrapped with a hanky into the AGP slot, and that seems to have done the trick.

Still, I think it may be living on borrowed time, so I am seriously looking at a replacement. It's time, anyway, this is a very old machine, I checked the invoice and it was dated 1/10/03! It has done very well, really, although it has had a replacement MB, graphics card, DVD writer and hard drive:)