Call me lucky, today while trying to program the correct port to use my printer I somehow shut down or eliminated a major "opening system " and my computer stoped working. I messed with it for an hour trying to find the problem and couldnt. Finally as a last resort I used the reinstall complete system thing a ma jig and it repaired the missing files and it now works,,,,,, Wife told me not to touch another (censored) thing on her computer,Gez
she thinks I fixed it ,but I was lucky

 

OOoooo yeah..... lucky, lucky YOU.

My computer is used for the business when not doing other things with it (like being here). A couple of months ago it was really getting slow to boot up. Finally it just beeped in a sequence and nothing came up on my monitor...."Black Screen". Not wanting to tell my husband (who sees computers as a necessary "evil" but will not use one himself) I tried all the tricks I could think of to get it to work. Finally asked a friend, who had more computer savvy, what the beeps were and described what was going on. He told me about the BIOS beep code and It sounded to him like a graphics card problem, or worse, a motherboard problem.

Went on another friend's computer to look these up and found out the problem. Yep, Graphics card failure. I have an intergrated motherboard (82845) and there was no way I could replace the card without replacing the motherboard if that was it. ARGH

Finally, I pulled this trick. Since my computer had not been aired out since I got it a year and a half prior (mid 2005).....I figured all it needed was a good "blowout".

So, I sweetly asked my husband to take his Oxygen tip and carefully blow any dust out (having done this before for our son's and knows about general upkeep). Ummmm....yes it did need it seeing we live in the desert and the office right next to the shop (smoke sometimes drifts in). Then hooked everything back up (still did not tell him anything other it needed a general cleaning.) Yep! Graphics problem was gone and the bootup was quick with no other problems. Just during that time too much dust had covered the card and this was slowly strangling it so to speak. Whew!

Later the next day, that same computer savvy friend told my husband I had a computer "crash". Which it did not. Just too many dustbunnies decided to roost inside. Just have to make sure they are kept out more often.