Dead, Which One
After work last night I met the guy that was building my PC at a Dunkin Donuts parking lot which was convenient since I was getting coffee anyway. He was a nice younger guy with either an Australian, New Zealand or South African accent. After talking for a few minutes I loaded up the box in the Tesla and excitedly drove home, anxious to start digging into the large task of migrating the system.
When I got home I pulled out my portable table and positioned it next to my main desk. After making all of the connections I hit the power button and got no response. Surely I just have to perhaps hold it longer? Nope, it won’t turn on. I did some basic trouble shooting like verifying power, removing all peripherals and still, my new powerhouse system was dead as a door nail.
I contacted the guy. He was dumbstruck as he had the system up and running for a couple hours during the day and had no issue. He told me to verify a couple connectors inside the computer were firmly seated, which I did with no change in symptoms. Jason was baffled by this but offered to drive out to our house to take a look immediately which I agreed to.
When he arrived and verified the systems mortality we did more looking inside. He noticed one of the wires on the big connector that goes from the power supply to the motherboard was not seated into it’s hole. He pressed it back in and the computer finally fired up. We both thought the crisis was averted and he headed home after I thanked him for the quick response.
Well as I started to work on the system things once again started getting flaky. The system started shutting itself off as I was in the middle of doing things, repeatedly. It happened at least five or six times in the span of 15 minutes. I contacted Jason again to give him the bad news. I was frustrated but calm about it, it wasn’t like I didn’t have a perfectly good computer to use for now. We agreed that the system should go back to him to get looked at in depth. However eventually the system did stay up and I was able to start doing some configuration work on it for around an hour. Although my roughly 30 years of experience made me know the issue was still likely there, maybe I’d get lucky. To give the system more of a burn in I left it on all night. When I came out in the morning the screen was again black and the system was unresponsive.
I let Jason know I would be dropping it off on my way to work. I boxed the computer back up and did exactly that. I told him to not be in a rush to get it back to me, I want to make sure the problems are gone. I need to be able to trust this hardware to be rock solid.
Tonight there is a tv scheduling conflict. The Eagles play the Giants in a Thursday night game that they desperately need to win and the last presidential debate will be on. The Eagles have generated so little excitement for me this year that I am leaning towards watching the debate and then flipping over to the Eagles game. I think it is hilarious that Donald is so unable to follow debate etiquette that they have had to give the moderator the ability to mute the mics to try to keep some level of control. Regardless, it will be a shit show for sure. Donald is desperate to distract voters from reality so he will be pulling out all stops to disrupt, avoid, and taunt.