indiboi.com

I had a problem with stale NFS handlers a little bit ago, the umount/mount trick didn’t work, so I rebooted.

Much to my horror the POST stuck on the “T” of “Memory Test” and nothing would work. I tried several times, took out each ram stick and tested individually, unplugged the drives, etc…. Nothing. I cleared the CMOS, remembered HP put a totally moronic banner up to hide the POST, and was even more screwed.

I called my brother David in my growing state of horror, still nothing. I arranged to buy his old computer from him… my budget just can’t afford everything for a new computer (considering pretty much nothing is usable from the old one at this point).

I then, forgetting to do it earlier, unplugged the USB hub.

It booted.

The Bluetooth dongle that I had moved from the front of the computer (the USB plug that is part of the card reader) to the hub (to get it out of the way)… when I removed that, plugged the hub back in…

It booted. The damned Bluetooth adapter kills the boot process of the computer, wtf? The computer boots without issue when it’s plugged into the front.

Now, unfortunately, the computer seems to think the CPU fan (which is infact non-existant) has failed. HP in their infinite wisdom uses the system fan to blow cool outside air over a big ol’ heatsink. The system fan still works, the sensor cable still works because the speed is read within the BIOS. Wtf?

The problem here is that unless the “F2″ key is pressed immediately upon the notice from the BIOS, the computer will shut itself down to prevent overheating. I can’t seem to find where to shut that “feature” off. Agh!

Anyway… who knows, I think I might end up swapping over to David’s old computer anyway, he’s asking $300, which feels like a good deal, it’s still better than this one afterall. It’s a AMD 64 2.8+Ghz or something, this is a P4 2.53Ghz; technically my CPU is faster on the clock, because of that whole weird not really the speed thing, but ahhhhhh!

So… my okay day turned into kind of a horror show. I guess everything is okay now, but that residual freak-out will last a long time.

Well, I found the little thing on the mainboard that says “cpu fan” and plugged the system fan into that, now it boots without moaning about the lack of cpu fan. This is really weird though, considering that the fan was plugged into the “sys fan” pins and it had worked without issue for years.

It should be mentioned that I bought this HP computer in an emergency years ago. The company’s server was going absolutely wacky, then my computer failed horribly. The amount of work necessary was beyond the scope of my little iBook’s 12″ screen… the HP has been a decent computer, but I did buy the most expensive computer that Circuit City had; major raping there.