I hate the blue screen of death

[TopPair2Pair]

Okay so its Computers versus TP2K and I am currently loosing 4-0. Basically myself and computers have a very poor relationship and its getting worse! Blog objective, not loose another pc to the blue screen of death.

Historical Note
Computer 1;
A Decent ish PC that I bought off my uncle for £600, kept me going for a good few years through College and Uni, back in the day when KaZaa was all the rage and you could do "a season" in a day on football/championship manager! Deceased 2004  

Computer 2;
My father PCs which I shrewdly swapped with Computer 1 before the old boy could realise. He would never have figured it out had i disguised my ingenious ruse a little better. Connecting the internet cable to the kettle was an unavoidable error of judgement on my part. Old boy then proceeded to fix Computer 1 in disgust and laugh in both, my face, as well as that of the blue screen of death. Obviously this was after fixing the violated kettle. Deceased 2005

Computer 3;
A dell PC that fell off the back of a lorry into my lap. It then fell off my desk and bounced into the bath tub, long and error prone incident that I never plan to recite again, alas it is too traumatic for man, beast & microprocessor. Deceased 2006

Computer 4;
Bit Torrent"ed to death. Need I say anymore? Deceased 2007.

Computer 4.5;
A laptop that my kind friend has loaned to me and I have since continued to demolish piece by piece. Currently its is used sheerly for poker and annoying members of the APAT forum. ETD (Estimated time of death): Late 2008, currently it falls over consistently like skeeter*.

Yes you did understand right, and yes it will be that long and very painful
Yup... Yep.... Yup... What!! Yes, a poker blog about fixing a PCs so my pokering experience can be better! So I am going to dip my toe in the blog section of the forum, thou other big toe shall simultaneously be dipped in geeky technology bath water in an effort to bring back to life components from computers 1 to 4 and repackage them into a sort of plastered PC for the elderly.

Budget
me thinks 4 to 5 low stake STT buyings

Planning
Next entry will be later on in the week, once I have assessed the usefullness of my leaning tower of cact PC"s.

In the meantime if anyone knows what a motherboard or harddisk are pls advise!  Also where best to get them cheap and in a compatible and reliable form?

* Skeeter Reference http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=LbmbQkX7czo

[lukybugur]

Gimme an idea what spec your current PC is and I"ll give you a hand. If you go to Start > right click on My Computer and Copy,Paste all that appears in that first window.

Then take the RAM out (small bits of circuitry around 5inches long) and tell me what the stickers say (256MB PC2700 for example).

Trawl eBay for a replacement motherboard is usually the best bet if you can get the model number. It saves having to reinstall Windows. Hard Drives can also be got on there too but if you want a decent spec one with an old IDE connection (it may be all your motherboard can handle), go for a new Seagate one like this

And if you"re still BitTorrenting, get a good Internet Security software - I recommend F-Secure Internet Security 2009. A 30 day trial can be downloaded from here.

[rubertoe]

all i read is blah blah blah!!

I hope you got your prob sorted TopPair

[TopPair2Pair]

all i read is blah blah blah!!

Standard response to my contribution anything poker related! lol

Gimme an idea what spec your current PC is and I"ll give you a hand.

Cheers Neil, I"ll get me misses to sort you out an onion bargi at my first apat event for every piece of advice you offer! u might get a lil bloated if you ask me!

Okay anyway its going to take me a little while to sort the pile of cact out and differentiate RAM from the other Green things. But in the mean time here"s what i am packing in my friends laptop now referred to as "Skeeter" as every now and then it goes to sleep on me.

Computer:
Mobile Intel(R) Pentium(R)
4 - M MPU 1.80GHz
1.79GHz, 256 MB of RAM

I have forced myself to stay away from bit torrents on Skeeter.

Unfortunately none of the other PCs seem to load up, is there a way I can tell which part of each is the fried one? ie motherboard or harddisk?

[lukybugur]

Gimme an idea what spec your current PC is and I"ll give you a hand.

Cheers Neil, I"ll get me misses to sort you out an onion bargi at my first apat event for every piece of advice you offer! u might get a lil bloated if you ask me!

Oh you wouldn"t wanna be anywhere near me after an onion bargi    

Okay anyway its going to take me a little while to sort the pile of cact out and differentiate RAM from the other Green things. But in the mean time here"s what i am packing in my friends laptop now referred to as "Skeeter" as every now and then it goes to sleep on me.

Computer:
Mobile Intel(R) Pentium(R)
4 - M MPU 1.80GHz
1.79GHz, 256 MB of RAM

Skeeter is old right enough. If you send "his" make and model number I"ll find out how much RAM he can handle.

Unfortunately none of the other PCs seem to load up, is there a way I can tell which part of each is the fried one? ie motherboard or harddisk?

Obviously if you think something has "fried", you"ll more than likely smell it - electrical fire is a fairly unique smell. Such fires are usually caused by dust. If your PC is dusty, vacuum it out and then have a good look around. Try smelling the Power Supply Unit (the square box where all the coloured wires originate) - if you have no power at all, it"s likely to be that that"s blown. A budget replacement PSU can be bought for around £20 inc delivery.

If it"s a motherboard fry, you"re into deeper do-do. If it"s a hard drive failure, it"s likely you"ll get so far into the StartUp procedure but it won"t boot into windows.

[TopPair2Pair]

Sorry Neil the Mrs. went on a Bargi making Strike. So, with such an embargo being enforced I couldn"t really source any advice on the new build!!  

Skeeter is still plodding away, I have however ditched Skeeter behind the sofa and pinched a bare bone base that my old man put together which is running kindly enough! Its obv a cheap n nasty one but hey, a slow computer never killed anyone! (albeit prolonged the pain staking death of a sleepy Skeeter).

Anyway I now plan to turn this thread into some form of Poker Blog.... It may revert back to a PC building thread blog on an Amateur Poker Tour Forum but in the meantime I shall try to keep my illogic for the poker tables.

[TopPair2Pair]

Okay. I"ve quite randomly decided to reactivate my feeble blog. Have removed all the previous entries and starting a fresh.

Blogspectations
Expectations for this are quite simple. I participated in a few games of the online league part of season 3 but didn"t really follow it through properly, hopefully this blog will give me some motivation to do a full season this time round. I"ll use blog to update on my daily pokering as well as keeping me general game focused. I am a pretty good breakeven player, with a bit of focus and no numptying around I"ll quite easily be able to earn some cheeseburgers. 

Okay so thats me done for today. More randomness again tomos.