Productive day.
Oct. 18th, 2006 07:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nolawitch58Arriving at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lab_rattus' mother's apartment at 10:30, I immediately made myself useful. Tried to boot up the computer with a known good hard drive I took with me attached. Dead. No beeps, no lights, no fan, not even the chirping of crickets. I then haul the box out of its cubby in the big desk unit, unhook all wires, pop the cover off and start yanking cables. She fetches me some Post-it notes to label the front panel wires. Finally, it's time to remove the motherboard. One screw out with no problem. Where the hell is the other one? Searching I come to a brass standoff sticking up from the motherboard. Someone had put the damned thing in with a standoff instead of a screw. We had a good laugh about that. Out with the old motherboard, in with the new one...except for the fact that the other board takes PC100 RAM and not DDR RAM.
lab_rattus was not a happy camper until I reminded her that we were mere blocks away from the Office Depot and we could call to see if they had any of the other type of RAM in stock. The next challenge came in locating the phone book, which we never did and had to call directory assistance. She called Office Depot and they had the RAM in stock. Off we went to snag it.
Allow me to digress a moment to address the assholes who are here from other states.
Dear Texas Twerps,
Go the fuck back to Texas. It's clear from your inability to maneuver in a parking lot that you need a bigger place to drive and park your behemoth vehicles needed to haul around your behemoth egos. Not one but two of your carpetbagging asses nearly ran over not one but both my friend and myself. She is quite sufficiently capable of committing serious injuries upon herself, but I prefer mental torture to physical ones, so go the hell back to Texas where your idiocy isn't so glaringly obvious amongst your own moronic kind.
No love,
NOLAWitch
Back to the apartment we went, snapped the RAM into the motherboard and then hit another snag trying to figure out the front panel wire connections. Fortunately, she had her laptop connected to the modem so she could bring the PDF of the manual up on the screen. Unfortunately, the silkscreening on the board was so dinky, we had to borrow her mother's reading glasses to discern the 6 pt. font the bastards use to label shit. Then the goofy Power LED connector had three wires where the jumper block only had room for two. We spent entirely too long figuring that mess out.
At long last, the machine sputtered to life. We got into the BIOS and configured everything. She booted an Ubuntu disk which found nothing wrong with the system, but couldn't find anything on the hard drive. Oh well, fdisk, format, reinstall, do dah! Windows reloaded fine. I installed a sound card and a new NIC. She's going to install the drivers later. I put everything back to rights.
Maybe she'll feel like she accomplished something. She's frustrated that she can't use her arm. Well, duh! It's broken. I was surprised that the doctors didn't have her wearing a sling. It wasn't taped or casted or anything. The bruising is extensive. She says it looked worse last week. She's also tired a lot. I pointed out to her that her body has put its energy into healing and that she could expect to have energy for frivolous stuff. She knows all that intellectually, but she doesn't like it emotionally.
That's the scoop on what I did today. Tomorrow, I sign up with another temp agency.
lab_rattus' mother's apartment at 10:30, I immediately made myself useful. Tried to boot up the computer with a known good hard drive I took with me attached. Dead. No beeps, no lights, no fan, not even the chirping of crickets. I then haul the box out of its cubby in the big desk unit, unhook all wires, pop the cover off and start yanking cables. She fetches me some Post-it notes to label the front panel wires. Finally, it's time to remove the motherboard. One screw out with no problem. Where the hell is the other one? Searching I come to a brass standoff sticking up from the motherboard. Someone had put the damned thing in with a standoff instead of a screw. We had a good laugh about that. Out with the old motherboard, in with the new one...except for the fact that the other board takes PC100 RAM and not DDR RAM.lab_rattus was not a happy camper until I reminded her that we were mere blocks away from the Office Depot and we could call to see if they had any of the other type of RAM in stock. The next challenge came in locating the phone book, which we never did and had to call directory assistance. She called Office Depot and they had the RAM in stock. Off we went to snag it.Allow me to digress a moment to address the assholes who are here from other states.
Dear Texas Twerps,
Go the fuck back to Texas. It's clear from your inability to maneuver in a parking lot that you need a bigger place to drive and park your behemoth vehicles needed to haul around your behemoth egos. Not one but two of your carpetbagging asses nearly ran over not one but both my friend and myself. She is quite sufficiently capable of committing serious injuries upon herself, but I prefer mental torture to physical ones, so go the hell back to Texas where your idiocy isn't so glaringly obvious amongst your own moronic kind.
No love,
NOLAWitch
Back to the apartment we went, snapped the RAM into the motherboard and then hit another snag trying to figure out the front panel wire connections. Fortunately, she had her laptop connected to the modem so she could bring the PDF of the manual up on the screen. Unfortunately, the silkscreening on the board was so dinky, we had to borrow her mother's reading glasses to discern the 6 pt. font the bastards use to label shit. Then the goofy Power LED connector had three wires where the jumper block only had room for two. We spent entirely too long figuring that mess out.
At long last, the machine sputtered to life. We got into the BIOS and configured everything. She booted an Ubuntu disk which found nothing wrong with the system, but couldn't find anything on the hard drive. Oh well, fdisk, format, reinstall, do dah! Windows reloaded fine. I installed a sound card and a new NIC. She's going to install the drivers later. I put everything back to rights.
Maybe she'll feel like she accomplished something. She's frustrated that she can't use her arm. Well, duh! It's broken. I was surprised that the doctors didn't have her wearing a sling. It wasn't taped or casted or anything. The bruising is extensive. She says it looked worse last week. She's also tired a lot. I pointed out to her that her body has put its energy into healing and that she could expect to have energy for frivolous stuff. She knows all that intellectually, but she doesn't like it emotionally.
That's the scoop on what I did today. Tomorrow, I sign up with another temp agency.
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no subject
Date: 2006-10-19 12:54 am (UTC)I am duly impressed at y'all's hardware skills. :-)
no subject
Date: 2006-10-19 02:33 am (UTC)Ayway, I am feeling a bit better, just so damn tired and weak. Of course my arm has become a wortheless piece 0'bone. Still hurts somewhat as well. As you know I find it so hard to slow down and my anxiety level is very high. I need to learn how to relax so as not to be so high strung. Any tips??
Twas, fun. See you later.
p.s. I will show my Mom how to back up her stuff
no subject
Date: 2006-10-19 02:44 am (UTC)I was going to remind you to show your mom how to do backups.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-19 12:32 pm (UTC)