Last night I installed a KVM switch and everything worked fine – for about an hour. Eventually I had to restart and in doing so encountered a rather large problem: the machine wouldn’t boot. So I unplugged everything and restarted but got hung up on the motherboard starter screen that usually disappears after a fraction of a second.

The motherboard at this point is testing three things: the processor, the ram, and the keyboard. Long story short, I’m pretty sure the KVM switch blew the keyboard relay on the motherboard. I tested a few different keyboards on the usb and ps2 ports but nothing even so much as powered on. So the problem is in the motherboard, but there is no point in replacing just the motherboard.

Why bother? It would cost $150 plus shipping and Id have to install it and configure the jumpers. Do I really want to spend that much money on the same system I already have, or would I rather spend a little more on a new barebones system that will scream?

I love it when they scream.
I’ll post the specs when I pick it out.

I walked into my office yesterday morning and was greeted by silence. A very unnerving sound when I had for months been greeted by the somewhat irksome spinning of my PC’s numerous fans. Something was wrong. Very wrong. Upon pushing the power button the machine started and beeped once. As soon as the text faded onto my screen I saw the problem, or the most likly cause, one of the processors in my duel core had failed. To be sure we removed the ram and tested this one by one. No luck. Then we tried the CMOS jumper to no avail. The prognosis was fatal. Time of death: sometime between 3 and 7am Wednesday 23, 2007.

Fortunately, my data (and that of my clients) is safe. This was a motherboard and processor issue, but had it been a software issue like if Windows had crashed or been attacked I would still be fine as I keep all client data on a different physical drive then my boot disk. This helps for two reasons, the first being that I can point the photoshop scratch file to be on this drive so its not conflicting with windows (helping PS performance). The second being that if I need to reformat/repair windows I can do it just to my C drive and not lose any data. I didn’t think of this simple defense until after I lost all my school work half way through sophomore year, but its saved me a ton of grief since then.

Plan for the worst while you hope for the best.

And from the ashes rises a new monster…AMD 64 x2 5400
2 Gigs of DDR2 800Few new hard drives512MB 7600 SLI graphics cards

Plus all the parts from my old pc. Next step will be to get a second video card (4 monitors!) and a bigger external HD to put in a lockbox. The idea being that I can do a monthly backup on this drive and if something were to happen to my office (building burns down) then I wont have to run into the burning building for my data. I think there are online services that do this, but I’m looking to backup gigs of data and it’s just easier this way.

Back to work!