Workstation Woes
My home built desktop workstation started acting up a few months ago. It started spontaneously restarting once every week or so. Over time it happened more and more often and it became unusable. It turned out to be bad RAM but it took a long time to get to a diagnosis. For one thing, it passed an overnight RAM test way back when I first noticed the problem. At that time it had only crashed a few times with a week or more between. I've never had RAM go bad before so while the problem got worse I was looking elsewhere. After I finally solved the RAM problem I started having boot problems. I would hear the single beep that says everything is OK so far, and then I would see the monitor come out of power save mode but there would be no splash screen from the BIOS. It would just hang there forever. If I tried again latter it might start normally and then work fine until I shut down again. This went on for a few days. It turns out I'd been using my laptop as a stand in workstation with the same monitor and wireless mouse. I'd swap the USB receiver for the mouse back an forth to my main box when it was working. I also had a wired USB mouse on my workstation that I put on there while testing. It turns out the workstation will not boot with both mouses attached even though it works fine with both after it's up. (!) One or the other is OK for booting but not both. (And I'd move the wireless to back to the laptop when I gave up trying to boot my main system...) Dang! I hope the hacking gods have less tedious projects in mind for me now. Please please please! [/items/hacks] permanent link