LCGuy
LC Doctor/Hot Rodder
It all started when I got a call from a customer. "Help me, my computer's dead"
Anyway, I went around there, and sure enough, her Celery 2 Ghz is failing the POST. I try reseating the connections, and try booting it up in a barebones configuration. Strange one, this one - when I try booting it up with no drives, the machine goes to boot fine, until it looks for a boot disk. However, as soon as I connect any drive, whether it be a floppy drive, hard drive, optical drive, no matter what, it will fail to POST. I've tried different RAM, a different PSU, different CPU, as well as resetting the CMOS, to no avail. Strange one, that one.
Anyway, one of her friends called, and when my customer mentioned to her that her computer died, she said that she had an old computer kicking around. We get in the car and go and have a look at it. Its a Optima (Australian PC mfr) P4/1.5 Ghz. Not bad, for free, and i'm not a fan of the fact that it uses SDRAM, but for someone like my customer, who used a Celeron 2 Ghz for running Office and accessing the Internet, its plenty. We go back to her place and plug it in. One graphics card swap and reformat/reinstall later (what I spent the better part of today doing, when not waiting for a truckload of photos and home videos to copy over USB 1.1), and we are off and away.
Anyway, when we were at her friends place, her friend also brought out this huge box full of god knows what and told me to take it, in case I could use something out of it. I get it home, and discover that it has:
- 3 Uniden cordless phones (i'm going to test these out, replace batteries as needed, clean them up and sell two, and keep the other)
- one "Audioline" caller ID monitor that is busted
- one classic Sony Discman
- 1 Genuine Nokia car charger, factory sealed
- 1 Genuine Nokia handsfree headset, factory sealed
- a truckload of various power adaptors
- a truckload of various phone cables
- one charger each for Nokia, LG and Samsung phones (no idea what i'll do with the Samsung phone, though I'm keeping the Nokia and LG chargers, since they work fine with my phones)
- a "docking station" type thing for a Samsung mobile
- some RCA cables
- a truckload of phone cables
- several metres of coax cable, used for TV antenna installations I'd imagine. Came with all the attachments and stuff needed, too.
So far the parents haven't killed me. I'm going to sell the sealed Nokia accessories, as I don't need them. I really don't NEED or WANT 3 cordless phone sets, so I'm going to test them all, clean them up, replace batteries as needed, keep one and sell the other two.
As for the Celery, i'm picking that up tomorrow. It has:
- 256MB of DDR266 (IIRC)
- a 20GB HDD (from the Optima - the customer's new Optima got the original 80GB from this system)
- FDD
- Mitsubishi CD-ROM drive
- Lite-on DVD+/-RW
- GeForce 4 Ti (most likely dead, it didn't work in the Optima)
- Winmodem
- 350 watt power supply
Anyway, I went around there, and sure enough, her Celery 2 Ghz is failing the POST. I try reseating the connections, and try booting it up in a barebones configuration. Strange one, this one - when I try booting it up with no drives, the machine goes to boot fine, until it looks for a boot disk. However, as soon as I connect any drive, whether it be a floppy drive, hard drive, optical drive, no matter what, it will fail to POST. I've tried different RAM, a different PSU, different CPU, as well as resetting the CMOS, to no avail. Strange one, that one.
Anyway, one of her friends called, and when my customer mentioned to her that her computer died, she said that she had an old computer kicking around. We get in the car and go and have a look at it. Its a Optima (Australian PC mfr) P4/1.5 Ghz. Not bad, for free, and i'm not a fan of the fact that it uses SDRAM, but for someone like my customer, who used a Celeron 2 Ghz for running Office and accessing the Internet, its plenty. We go back to her place and plug it in. One graphics card swap and reformat/reinstall later (what I spent the better part of today doing, when not waiting for a truckload of photos and home videos to copy over USB 1.1), and we are off and away.
Anyway, when we were at her friends place, her friend also brought out this huge box full of god knows what and told me to take it, in case I could use something out of it. I get it home, and discover that it has:
- 3 Uniden cordless phones (i'm going to test these out, replace batteries as needed, clean them up and sell two, and keep the other)
- one "Audioline" caller ID monitor that is busted
- one classic Sony Discman
- 1 Genuine Nokia car charger, factory sealed
- 1 Genuine Nokia handsfree headset, factory sealed
- a truckload of various power adaptors
- a truckload of various phone cables
- one charger each for Nokia, LG and Samsung phones (no idea what i'll do with the Samsung phone, though I'm keeping the Nokia and LG chargers, since they work fine with my phones)
- a "docking station" type thing for a Samsung mobile
- some RCA cables
- a truckload of phone cables
- several metres of coax cable, used for TV antenna installations I'd imagine. Came with all the attachments and stuff needed, too.
So far the parents haven't killed me. I'm going to sell the sealed Nokia accessories, as I don't need them. I really don't NEED or WANT 3 cordless phone sets, so I'm going to test them all, clean them up, replace batteries as needed, keep one and sell the other two.
As for the Celery, i'm picking that up tomorrow. It has:
- 256MB of DDR266 (IIRC)
- a 20GB HDD (from the Optima - the customer's new Optima got the original 80GB from this system)
- FDD
- Mitsubishi CD-ROM drive
- Lite-on DVD+/-RW
- GeForce 4 Ti (most likely dead, it didn't work in the Optima)
- Winmodem
- 350 watt power supply