Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Hopefully my computer is not going to die anytime soon though it probably will.

I turned off my computer, unplugged everything, opened it up and took out the graphics card and got the air blower ready. I then BLEW all the dust out of my computer with the air compressor (my Kirby vacuum cleaner- with the proper attachment it comes a damned good but DAMNED LOUD air compressor :) ).

Then I put the graphics card back in, closed the case back up, plugged it back in and turned it on.

And was HORRIFIED when it told me I needed to enter SETUP to recover my BIOS. I tried, but the video only showed 1/4 of the screen with no movement- had to turn it all off.

Spent the next HOUR fighting with my computer. It would start to load, then blue screen. Would start to load, then give me a device missing error. Finally, it told me to enter SETUP again and I did so- looked at the settings, left. It blue screened. Then it loaded further, device missing errored. Loaded FURTHER, blue screen and NOW it's loaded and it seems to be stable...

I do not know why it had such problems and I can only hope it will continue to start when I turn things on in the morning :| If I go suddenly dark, now you know WHY.

6 comments:

  1. Hmmm, that sounds really strange =S

    A few things comes to mind. You used your Kirby Vacuum as an "air compressor", right?

    As far as I know you need to take care to check that whatever you use don't spit out moisture or oils along with the air that can cause shorts in the long run. Apparently some regular air compressors do this without the right filters so I'm sticking with my regular compressed air cans myself, taking care to angle them correctly or I get a lot of moisture out of them.

    Secondly did you have any sort of contact between the vacuum and the computer itself? I once killed a graphics card with the static electricity when vacuuming my computer, sometimes you learn the hard way =S

    It's not impossible that you built up a static charge yourself while vacuuming and discharged when touching your computer.

    Googling "enter setup to recover bios" seems to show all sorts of valuable info, some even refer to the bios battery or dodgy displayport cables (how cables could possibly affect the bios are beyond me though).

    I'm guessing it's a fairly modern rig? I had a mobo that the capacitors failed on, but that was running 24/7 between 2006 and 2015 ^^

    Worst case your motherboard got a good enough jolt somehow to have something fail and you should be fine by just replacing it, but keeping my fingers crossed it was just something temporary though!

    Got your complete specs somewhere for reference?

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    1. I had a huge reply and blogger ate it.

      Anyway, long reply short; I stay grounded with the computer case at all times. I think it may be moisture as my Kirby was heating up. I NEED to use air-compressor power- small can of air pressure didn't work and I LOST a graphics card to dust because the can just couldn't cut it. What I need to do, I think, is let my comp sit for a half hour Just In Case there IS moisture. AND maybe get a fine screen to put over the spitting end... just in case :)

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    2. Plus jaja it's a fairly new, no more than a year old on ALL parts EXCEPT the case- the case and fans are 15 years old!It's an ASUS motherboard, an AMD A10 Processor or APU or SOME damned thing that's FAIRLY newish from AMD; 32 gigs ram. It's a 4.2 ghz board with 4 comp cores, 8 graphical cores but I have an AMD r9 290x video card.

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    3. ASUS makes damned good stuff so it should be able to take a beating =)

      I think your plan sounds good! In case there's moisture leaving it turned off for a while should do the trick.

      Has it worked flawlessly since the incident now?

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  2. Computers are really weird machines :{

    I hope you can handle it all, I don't know about these things but I wish good luck my friend... so, thumbs up on that ;)

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