The Last Candle

Downgrade 2008 is nearly complete. The process has only taken about…three days.

Needless, this has been quite the G-D mess. Here’s the dish.

As of last Monday, two days I found my main PC dead and one day after deciding on “downgrading” to replacement hardware, Downgrade ‘08 wasn’t looking so good. The search through the usual hardware outlets revealed that the only available new replacement for a Socket-939 board was a Foxconn board. Not having any affinity for a second-tier brand of manufacturer, Downgrade ‘08 was upgraded: after two days of teeth-gnashing and bank-account-balance checking, I decided to buy a modern-generation motherboard, with matching processor and RAM modules. Downgrade ‘08 had become Upgrade ‘08.

Instead of the usual in-depth analysis of the current hardware market, an endeavor to eek out the best price-performance components that I used to do whenever an upgrade was imminent, I took a huge shortcut and basically stuck with Ars Technica’s Value Gaming Box suggestions.

The parts arrived on Friday and included a new hard drive (the current drive is running out of space — need more space!) and a new power supply (hey, if the power supply goes bad, that failure has the potential to ruin every other component, so another $50 for a new part is a sound investment).

With the arrival of new parts comes the lovely evening spent putting the big unwieldy puzzle together, which became my Friday night, which was preluded by an afternoon of dusting. At 8:30 EST, the rebuild began: everything old was pulled out, and everything new — CPU! Socket 775 mainboard! RAM modules, surrounded by electric-blue heatsinks! Hard drive! Power supply! — was loaded into the case. I plugged the new rig into a monitor and punched the power button to boot the system. The improvement over the old machine — which didn’t power up at all — was immediate, as the various fans in the system (including the incredibly-loud GPU fan) whizzed to life. And then…

No POST. That is, the power-on self-test wasn’t running, a test that concludes in some kind of beep code denoting the status of the boot-up process. Without a monitor attached (a “headless” setup), the beep code is an indicator of the progress of the booting process. A single beep usually means that the boot was successful, where different series and durations of beeps could signify, for example, a primary memory or video card issue.

In my machine’s case, no beeps were emitted, which is a sign that the machine was non-operational. Friday night: not a good night for computin’.

Saturday morning brought a recovery: after I pulled all components out of the case, including reseating the CPU, enacting a sort of reversal of the previous night’s installation, the system did POST (and beep!) after completely removing all components, including the CPU from the socket, and loading everything back in again. Now it was all installing software — Vista was up first, a modern OS for the new modern hardware.

The new installation of Vista didn’t wait long to go awry: much like the video corruption I experienced with 3D-accelerated games under Windows XP, the Desktop Window Manager (or DWM), which draws the desktop interface via the GPU and is the prime mover for the Aero visual theme, exhibited the same corruption and hence a completely unusable interface.

Games run under XP would exhibit this corruption occasionally, which largely looked like a solid color overlaid by a cascade of oblique lines and jagged stairsteps. After a bit of desperate tweaking I discovered that the XP solution to the corruption was to minimize in the game’s window, revealing the Windows XP Desktop, which was fine, and then opening the game’s window again, which apparently was enough to resolve whatever ailment previously afflicted the renderer. Apparently the GPU just needed to be distracted a bit, after which it would go back to full-on, perfect rendering (and how).

Windows Vista’s DWM actively uses the GPU to render the environment all of the time. In other words, when the output is corrupt in Vista, there’s no simple solution like the Windows XP-context remedy: when the signal is bad in Vista — and the video signal is indeed bad in Vista for this machine, corrupt and jumbled and jagged on every boot-up without fail, just like the 3D-accelerated games under XP — the operating system is essentially useless outside of Safe Mode, which is severely crippled for the obvious reason of ensuring compatibility and system stability (the video corruption doesn’t appear in Safe Mode likely because of a generic VGA driver powering the output).

So Vista is causing all sorts of problems. Fine, I thought, I’ll go back to Windows XP, which at least has a history of stability.

Windows XP wouldn’t even complete the installation: after the initial loading of system files, the operating system threw an “Error Loading Operating System” error when trying to boot; this exception is apparently caused by a BIOS that can’t handle the size of the disk. Seeing as how Vista loaded up without complaints, I’m more inclined to believe that Windows XP itself has a problem with the drive capacity (which, by the way, is a modest 20 GB for the system partition).

Windows XP won’t boot at all. Vista throws out garbage and is unusable. A Windows 2000 disc is around here somewhere, but I’d rather not turn this debacle from Upgrade 2008 into Sad Regression 2008. If I can’t get the new hard disk working as a system drive, I’ll backup and format the “old” (and still very capable) IDE disk with intent to employ it as the system disk. The new SATA drive will be used for everything else, which would be a heck of a lot of everything else.

Sigh. At least the MacBook Pro is working wonderfully.

My main desktop, a cobbled-together PC, is evidently destined to be replaced about every two years: in 2004, I plunked down some cash to buy a new chassis, motherboard and CPU to upgrade the Celeron processor that was adept at running Word and little else; 2006’s upgrade occurred after acquiring some extra funds courtesy of a tax return, metamorphosing what was a Word machine in a everything-on-high-quality gaming box.

Now the time for 2008’s upgrade has come. The figurative starter pistol signifying the upgrade fired early this morning, after an attempt to wake up the desktop PC from the usual overnight sleep-mode status resulted in…nothing. Silence. No power.

The quick assumption was that the power supply had blown a gasket — fair enough guess, since, well, the power part of the computer-worky equation was obviously absent during the whole, y’know, power-on part. I didn’t have a multimeter on hand to test the voltage that the PSU was supposedly providing to the mainboard, but troubleshooting was underway once I dropped by the parents’ house for the weekly visit, hauling the computer along with me in the hopes of borrowing one of the ‘meters owned by my Dad. Once at the abode and provisioned with a selection of voltage-meters, I set to work and tested the supply for signs of life.

Before I began taking voltage checks, the only signs regarding the health of the power supply were 1) the motherboard wasn’t powering up, which could either be a sign of a bad PSU or a bad motherboard, and 2) the power supply was making a high-pitched electric squeal-growl when turned on. A power supply that supports an ATX motherboard doesn’t power on its internal fan unless the motherboard is also powered on, so I’d have to investigate via less-obvious methods. In a case like this, either everything comes to life or nothing does.

After ditching one multimeter that couldn’t be bothered to give a correct reading (the stupid thing alternated between giving a random milli-volt reading or a long whiny beep with “SHRT” displayed, regardless if the circuit was completed), another multimeter deemed the voltage output from the PSU to be satisfactory — a correct five volts of DC power was pulled from the stand-by power pin, a pin that sends power regardless if the motherboard was on or not. A reading from the stand-by pin is a good beginning indicator that a supply is okay, but knowing for sure would require testing the 12V, 5V and 3.3V pins.

Easiest way to check the rest of those voltages: plug the power supply into an old, unused motherboard and see if gears started turning. Once I got back to my apartment, I did exactly that — and after I did plug in power supply to old motherboard, that old motherboard and power supply’s fans started right up, which was all the evidence I needed to determine that the supply was indeed in good shape.

Which means my desktop PC’s motherboard is very likely toast. There’s nothing wrong with your stomach or lungs, but your heart and vascular system is basically dead, and so are you.

Assuming the motherboard is dead, the departure would be the third time I’ve lost a mainboard to a mechanical fault; the first two breakdowns happened to the same brand and model ‘board (bought twice in a row, once after the first board crashed and burned) that I later discovered was known to choke on its own tongue more often than is acceptable. Fortunately motherboards burning out on their own just isn’t common — the hardware is solid-state enough that the cause of collapse is most often attributed to a consequent of another component failure (e.g., a failing power supply, or a front-side-bus fan that stops working), or more likely the motherboard survives up through the time it is discarded after an upgrade.

I have no idea why this board is dead, of course. This PC is rarely taxed, certainly not hard enough to necessitate its fairly high-powered innards. The graphics card was top of the line two years ago, smart and fast enough to run whatever gee-whiz game had come out at the time, but nine out of ten games run I’ve on this box could be run on a computer that’s five or six years old. (When I bought the video card, the first game I cranked up? Planescape: Torment, in all of its beautiful 2D glory.) This machine is used primarily and almost all of the time for archiving files and media, composing non-writing creative work (e.g., photo- and video-editing — I do all my writing on the MacBook), coding, and yes, playing the occasional game once or twice a week. This machine is a necessary tool in my weekly and daily repertoire, as geeky and introverted that repertoire is.

But while the desktop mainstay is a necessary tool, it doesn’t need to be supercharged, million-RPM tool — I just need a box so I can archive, compose, code and play a bit. That’s why this year’s changing of the hardware will be Downgrade ‘08, not Upgrade ‘08. More testing of other critical components is needed (please, please let the hard drive — the one with 40 GB of non-backed-up photos — be well and dandy), but I’m assuming that a motherboard replacement is all that’s necessary to get the whole rig steaming along as it did before this minor upset. Once that’s decided, point me towards the least-expensive dependable motherboard I can buy, just enough so I can get back to my files, media and simple games.

Dusting out the inside of the computer case wouldn’t hurt either, given the opportunity, seeing as opening the side cover revealed a sort of dust-bunny metropolis cooped up inside the chassis. An ounce of prevention and all that, although I might already be paying a few pounds worth of cure.

What if I did decide to upgrade the main desktop? Problems — money-wise ones. The hardware generation has changed so much since the last upgrade that a hardware swap would require exchanging all three major logic components — motherboard, CPU and RAM — since each component depends on the presence and compatibility of the other two. My now-dead, digital-cadaver desktop was given a CPU upgrade six months ago, and even back then the choice of upgrades was singular: only one model of AMD x64 dual-core processor was available for the motherboard’s 939 socket, as all previously-released models had been discontinued to make room for an inventory of processors dedicated to the latest socket. I wouldn’t expect even that last model to exist now, having probably run out of production and stock months ago.

A current-generation mainboard would require a current-generation processor that fits into the current-generation socket, and the lot would be supplemented by the current-generation RAM technology. Cost: non-trivial by a long measure, and a little pointless besides, honestly, because the high-power hardware would be used mostly for editing photos and reading RSS feeds.

But I still really some sort of desktop up and running, hence Downgrade 2008.

Chris, aka BOB Sysop, aka The Man with His Finger on “rm -rf [The Last Candle]”, sent me an email this morning to remind me of DarkRoom, a Windows-only companion to my new OS X love WriteRoom. DarkRoom is free, unlike the current state of WriteRoom, which began as a free app and has since graduated to pay-for-play.

DarkRoom is developed by a college chum of Chris’, and the joke is on him: by not charging for DarkRoom the fellow won’t get a dime out of suckers like me who are comfortable spending a week’s worth of lunch money on a full-screen word processor. (Ah ha, but his DarkRoom site has a donate button. What’s more reasonable: the seller who allows the buyer to set his own price, or the one who is confident enough in his product’s worth to dictate a static cost? Good on ‘em both.)

Chris also clued me into the fact that the comments to the entertainment category aren’t working — attempting to submit a comment returns a no-permissions error much like what happens in the recently-added science category. Great. This place is falling apart by the day.

Since I use Blosxom as my CMS, and because the entirety of Blosxom is contained in a single Perl script, adding comments necessitated harnessing what is essentially a separate, additional CMS on top of Blosxom. These choices of script- and entirely Perl-based managers that lack a GUI of any sort have undoubtably increased my personal threshold for pain and discomfort, even more so than the most frustrating game I’ve ever played, which might explain why I look forward to appointments at my dentist’s office. (Actually, I don’t mind visits to the dental office because my dentist tells me in detail about the state of the artisan-beer market.)

Given that nearly this entire journal is run and managed by two scripts written a language I know nearly nothing about, and given that I have no inclination or desire to wrangle with file permissions and said scripts, comments should be considered inoperable. If any intrepid readers happen upon a category (like this one!) that still allows comments, best wish it goodbye, or, preferably, good riddance, because the glorious end is near.

Sunday night, and I’m sitting at my latest (as of the last two weeks) writing desk, the coffee table in front of the audio system and television. I was supposed to be tuned into the Olympics, even though the reception ranges between flurry and blizzard, but unless the current event is the Alternative Medicine Finals, NBC is running some kind of fluff piece.

Gracing the screen (forecast: moderate precipitation) is a doctor (or “doctor” rather) who is jabbing needles into some poor woman’s milky forearm. Ah: Eastern-based Olympics with Eastern-based medicine. The volume to the TV is off (the system is playing A Night with John Petrucci and Jordan Rudess at my bidding), so I can’t hear this fellow’s blather, but from the looks of the nonsense, I’m magnitudes better off with the Petrucci.

Now Doc is pointing at a chart of a human being — the map is decorated with dots and connecting lines that span the whole front of its body. That graph is either a public-transit map for bacteria, or meridian lines and points; given the chance to prove the chart�s authority, I’d take the bacteria perspective and try to pull the “Biology is art!” gambit, something made up by me and has as much veracity as meridian-based chiropractic practices.

This meridian junk has been airing for about five minutes now. Maybe this show is some kind of prolonged informercial. I haven’t watched any network TV in…well, probably since I bought the TV three years ago — I didn’t actually get a over-the-air reception until a few days ago, when I bought a rabbit-ears antenna — so maybe I should give network TV a little more breathing room. Heroes is popular after all, even if the commercials make it look like X-Men-lite, which is x number of men and women too many.

The program just seemlessly cut to Bob Costas. Ever heard of the expression, “Lie down with dogs, and you’ll wake up with fleas?” Tonight the part of the dog is played by the bad doctor, with Bob in a starring role as Waking-Up Man. The fleas will be billed as extras.

This coming-out party for network television in my household over the past week has not been rosy. After the Olympics are done, the new antenna will go right into the closet with the other, non-working antenna. (As for Heroes, Berlin Alexanderplatz is doing just fine, even thought it lacks mutants.)

Maybe my perception of the Olympics would be enhanced if I had caught the much-lauded opening ceremonies. The theatrics part, with the drumming and the dancing and the sychronized everything, is the talked-about bit, but some Olympics-watching chums, who I suspect have watched more hours of Olympics than China has won gold medals, even complimented the dancing girls who mashed-potatoed throughout the entire, two-hour procession of participating countries. I wasn’t sure what to make of that until Roger Ebert made a similar statement in his “journal” (don’t call it a blog!) entry Zhang Yimou’s Gold Medal. Nice job, ladies!

The bottom line has two points: one, I’ve never had much interest in the Olympics, which is due in part to the second point, which is that I’ve never had much interested in televised sports. Although I don’t watch much TV, I would probably hop into the ring if the advertisements for the various stations offered anything that interested me, which they haven’t since the first season of Lost and Firefly (and I watched both of those on DVD anyway). How about this idea: W. R. H., a miniseries in thirteen parts and an epilogue? Might be good.

(This has been a part of the blogging recovery program. Writer’s block has never been a problem for me; rather, writer’s balk is my current disorder. A few times a month for the past few months have produced entries that are near-completed and abandoned in the end, unfinished and unposted. My guess for the lack of production is due in part to the he breath and topics of the entries — mostly personal business or occupational rants — so I’m trying something a little lighter, and nothing can be lighter than snide live-blogging of the Olympics, for cryin’ out loud.)

(Also, this has been a test for WriteRoom, which has fared admirably well for allowing me to concentrate on writing and not catching up on science blogs.)