Troubleshooting
by jeff
Troubleshooting PC issues has probably become one of my least favorite things in the world. Things go wrong for seemingly no reason, and figuring out exactly what's up is usually a supreme pain in the ass. Over the years I've replaced motherboards, painstakingly salvaged data off of failing hard drives, and spent hours staring at a PC that wouldn't POST only to finally realize it was because th...
Troubleshooting PC issues has probably become one of my least favorite things in the world. Things go wrong for seemingly no reason, and figuring out exactly what's up is usually a supreme pain in the ass. Over the years I've replaced motherboards, painstakingly salvaged data off of failing hard drives, and spent hours staring at a PC that wouldn't POST only to finally realize it was because there was a small spot where the board was grounding out on the case.
So when my current machine started acting up, I just sort of ignored it. I've since bought a MacBook Pro that I use to do all my important computing, leaving the PC as an occasional game machine, but mostly this quad core CPU and Geforce 8800 Ultra are used to run iTunes so I can sync up my iPod to my full library, instead of the small slice of it I keep on my laptop. That's right, it's a $3,000 jukebox.
Unfortunately, it's not even very good at that anymore. For the longest time it was randomly blue-screening, and the error codes just weren't conclusive. Then it was just locking up without actually rebooting. Now, any sort of persistent disk access (like audio playback) seems to stutter and chug from time to time, occasionally locking up all the way. I just threw a new drive in over the weekend, thinking that maybe the drive with all the music on it was acting up. That didn't really change anything. I tried disconnecting the old music drive, thinking it might be failing and dragging everything else down with it. Nope. I stripped it all the way down to just my boot drive, and it locked up within five minutes.
So I think I've got it narrowed down to one of two things. Either my boot drive is slowly failing, or I'm overloading this thing's power supply, which could be causing all sorts of random chaos. It's a 1,000 watt power supply, but I can't really find any realiable way to figure out how much wattage I'm actually using. I guess I'm going to try to clone my boot drive to a different drive and see if the current boot drive is the issue. If that doesn't fix it, I guess I could reformat and reinstall Windows. I'd really rather not do that. At this point, maybe I should just build something super cheap, throw all these big drives in it, and make it a pure media server. But that wouldn't exactly leave me equipped for playing games or making music, which still requires the PC. While I could (and probably should) make the jump to Logic Pro or some other Mac-based sequencing for the music, there's still this whole "oh, yeah, occasionally you might want to review a PC game" thing.
There are certainly times when I think of just dragging it into a Best Buy or whatever and paying someone to fix it... but I'm not that far gone yet. I certainly believe in the whole "my time is worth money" theory, but not with the insane rates they'd probably charge.
