Finally

Yay! [:)]

I made a thread at HardWareZone forums seeking help for my CPU hanging problem. Someone suggested increasing Vio (Voltage IO) and so, I did. Now, the new AthlonXP is running fine for the whole night~ What a relief.

Everytime I buy new hardware or stuff related to computers, I would ALWAYS encounter problems. [:(]. Let’s start with my very first PC. A 286. Given to me by my mother’s friend. I had my first taste of DOS and I explored every folder on it’s C:. It had a bible inside! I read the first few chapters of Genesis and I stopped. It also contains the game, Civilization, which I loved to play. Then I tried installing a mouse, and even bought my first game on a floppy disk, The Prince of Persia, which bore me. After some time, virus struck. I remember the name of it was Stoned Virus. Pretty soon, the computer can’t be used and because I still don’t know much about them computers, it was sold to the karanguni man (rag-and-bone man) for a small sum of money.

A year or 2 later, I bought my second PC. Powered by an Intel Pentium 2 233MHz with only 32MB of SDram, 4MB AGP graphics card and a 3.2GB harddisk!! [8|] . At first, I played games on it. Command and Conquer: Red Alert! [X)]. Learned a lot of stuff like designing websites, mp3s, graphic design, computer hardware and overclocking. Hah! My design sense was piss poor then. (Not that I’m any better now). During the first few days, it would always hang in windows 95. Thinking of those problems sends shivers down my spine. The problem was eventually solved by bringing it back to the shop and the guy left it on overnight. Now, I suspect what he did was to “burn in” the CPU. Sort of like warming it up for the long run.

There was this girl back in secondary school who called me up once. Says she’s pissed at this guy in our class for this and that. And asked me to send that guy a virus. I accepted the task but not whole heartedly. I had some virus EXEs on my computer back then, which I kept just for fun. I registered a hotmail email account with a female name. Sent the guy the email with the virus programs. Few days later, I heard he had his windows reinstalled and was asking around for email addresses.

Around my first year at poly, I was able to buy a more powerful computer. My stepfather’s relative had given me a very big ang pow! (red packet) I think it was $300. So what I did with that money was to buy a new motherboard together with a CPU. My current MSI K7T Turbo + AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1GHz. I don’t remember whether I encountered any problems with the new hardware. Eventually, I saved up enough money for more ram and 6.4GB harddisk. Got a freelance work to do a simple, full-of-javascript website for this Junior College student at a price of $150 and wallah! Acquired GeForce2 32MB MX200! *Final Fantasy fanfare music playing in the background*

The next worse problems were viruses. I forgot the name but it struck computers on a certain day, wiping out a lot of MY PRECIOUSSSSSS data. [:(]. One distinct feature of that virus is it’s ability to cock up your BIOS chip making your computer unbootable, which fortunately, did not cock up mine. A reformat was done to get things back up.

During the years of 2003-2004, starting with my Industrial Attachment at MobileOne, I used the money I earned to buy a Creative Audigy soundcard. It had some audio glitches. I searched the net and fixed it. The cause was the CPU cooling software I had been using, called VCool. Just some minor changes in the settings of VCool. Then I bought a 120GB harddisk! [XD] The damn shop, Costronics, sold me the wrong model. Which caused me a lot of frustration. After getting the correct model, I excountered crashes while doing file transfers between harddisks. After hours of troubleshooting, and I even reinstalled Windows XP, I found out VCool was causing the problem! [>(]. That was when I stopped using it.

Lemme see… Next up is my CDwriter! I mentioned before in my blog entries. I had bought bad media for it. Experienced huge frustration. Soon, I bought my Radeon 9800PRO. A 128MB high end graphics card. Windows kept hanging and I found out it was because I had my CPU overclocked.

I think I’ve summed it all up. The stories of my hardware problems. My curse.