PC Won't Boot. Stops During Memory Check.

But I fixed it!!

Here's the whole story, but if you just want the fix; scroll down to the bottom.

The night before last I had cause to reboot my old PC. Since it has been at Dads it has been on constantly, but when I rebooted it it got a quarter of the way through the memory check and froze up solid.

I hit F12, F2, Del trying to get into the BIOS but it was completely locked up, so I reboot again and again and again. Same thing.

So I take out the memory (2 x 1GB) and try each stick on its own in each of the 4 slots. Same thing, only gets half way through 1GB before freezing up, same place every time with each memory stick. Well, it would be a strange coincidence that both memory modules are causing a memory error at same place and locking up the whole machine, so for now I can discount that!!

Then I notice the CPU fan. Err ... there seems to be half the carpet wedged between then fan and the heat sink. *cough* OK I'll vacuum that out and let it cool down while I pop to the pub for a beer. Cursing myself on the way that I have probably fried my CPU.

So I come back an hour later and gah, still not working. *sulk*

So I spent most of yesterday at work searching the internet for ideas and solutions and I had a list of things to check when I got home last night.

For once I chose to do the easiest thing first. That was to remove all USB devices. I thought it can't be that, but lets just eliminate that as a possibility.

Well actually the first thing I did was turn it on hoping that 24 hours of downtime would cure it. Nope! still knackered.

So, lets remove the USB devices. BINGO. I removed the USB Keyboard, USB Mouse and Nostromo n52 and then PC went flying through the memory check and then told me "No Keyboard Installed" so I plugged the keyboard back in and hit F1 and "Wiz Bang Wallop" it proceeds to the IDE check and then Windows loads.

Plug in other USB devices all is fine. Reboot PC. Locks up at memory check. Remove all but keyboard. Reboot. Fine.

Thinking back on it the last time I successfully rebooted was before I plugged my sons Razer Gaming mouse in.

It seems that like old PCs would try and boot off a floppy (if one was left in the drive) and give you a "Non System Disk" error; my PC is trying to boot the BIOS or something off a mouse - hahahhaha!!

Not an uncommon problem apparently, but you would think it could lock up in a more user friendly manner wouldn't you? A message would be nice.

So there you go, if this happens to you, try unplugging your USB devices before you go hacking your PC to bits :)

If this has been helpful to you please leave me a comment.

Nostromo n52te Review

Oh yes, I got me the tournament edition Nostromo a little while back. I'm a little behind the times but they have been rare as rocking horse shit in europe. I'd been checking Amazon and Belkin websites regularly and finally a German company selling on Amazon had one in stock for £50 -I snapped it up!

I figured that now that I have 2 PCs (one at my dads and one at home) I can have a Nostromo on each so I don't have to lug loadsa hardware about - that includes new set of uber-headphones as well!

Well, the n52te has the same basic layout of the original but has a few slight changes.

Pros

• Backlighting - looks good, well wicked actually, but has little real utility as my hand is on the unit all the time and I play by feel. There is a switch underneath to turn the backlighting on and off.
  
• Buttons - The buttons are slightly different, they feel less clunky and more positive.
• Upload Manager - Its more sparkly than before, but a lot of that is just the skin. If I made changes to my profile whilst WoW was running it wouldn't pick up the new keybindings. Until I found the Apply Changes button! But this is more intuitive than the original software. I haven't RTFM and I can get it all working :)
  
• Macro Creator - again this seems to have been refined. It seems easier to use, but is that just the re-skinning?
• Apparently it has on-board memory so your profiles are saved on the keypad itself and will therefore work on whatever you plug it in to. I haven't tried this yet but that's a big plus for me. Push come to shove I can play WoW on 5 different PCs and have the Nostromo software on 3 of them. Now I don't have to keep profiles in line and I can plug it into TiceNits' and my sons PCs.
  

Cons

• D-pad - rather than the original D-pad this one has a crappy little mushroom stuck on top of it. OK, if you want 8 axis of movemement then this may be considered slightly easier, but when I'm playing wow I often find myself going sideways rather than straight on. I'm getting used to it but it just doesn't feel right :(
• Buttons - It may just me being used to the original Nostromo but the bottom row of buttons (the one with just 4) don't feel distinct enough. My fingers don't rest naturally on them and I am not able to tell which button is which. The far right button is the worst it seems to "blend" into the "bodywork".
• Thumb Button - It's a bit temperamental, unless you push it just right it sometimes doesn't activate.

I'm not going to go into how useful this (and the original) is, Valenna has already done a great job over there. As many have said before they can't imagine playing WoW without it. I feel naked without mine.

WoW Banhammer Disclaimer: Whilst it is possible to programme delays into your Nostromo macros and also repeated keystrokes on one key press (with or without delays) this is against the ToS, EULA, blah of WoW and could and probably has been considered by Blizzard as automating play resulting in a perma-ban. Do so at your accounts risk. I'm not risking mine!

WTF is up with Vista?

I finally got my new PC from DELL yesterday. An XPS 720 that I had customised somewhat, like boosting the graphics and upgrading memory.


Cost me around £1500 - that's nearly 3K of your americum dollar!

4GB of dual channel memory it has, confirmed by looking in the BIOS, what does Vista report?

Vista tells me it has 3069 MB - I dunno where those last 3 MB went - but that's 3GB in my book.

WTF? I ring DELL support and I'm told (by someone in India that can barely speak English - don't start me on that!) that because it's dual channel it is over the capacity of Windows Vista to use or something.

Does anyone know what that means or whether it was just bullshit from DELL? How can I trust Vista to do 64 Billion calculations per second if it can't count past 3?

I've done a little research and it all talks about how 32-bit systems can only reference 4GB worth of memory addresses and they have to use some of the memory address for virtual memory devices or something, so they are unusable by the real-life actual physical fucking memory sticks that I paid extra fucking money for - Bastards! Or something equally as bollox! Anyone care to shed any light on that?

And if that is right why did DELL sell me a PC with Vista (Don't start me on that either - I WANTED XP!!!!!!!!!!!!!) a 32-bit operating system and 4GB of RAM if the OS can't fucking use it?

Goddam Cheap Japanese Flying Packs

A prize* to the first person who can tell me who uttered those words in my favourite film of all time.

Anyway, it's not cheap Japanese flying packs that I'm annoyed with, it's one of my Netgear routers.

I spent 3 hours last night on the phone to my ISP before they closed at 21:00 because my broadband wasn't working. This didn't resolve the issue so I was without WoW all last night!! Argggggg.

So this morning I took the router round to a friend's house to remove router problems from the equation and guess what? It didn't work there either. It reported that it had up and downstream speeds, and these were different from the speeds reported at home.

I rebooted it, I hard rebooted it and then I ended up booting the fucking thing out the door and going and buying a new one. £79.99 and 30 minutes later I'm online.

The kid is happy again, running level 3s all round Eleywn (sic) forest and my bank balance is a little lighter!

But the new router has blue flashy lights on it so all's good!

Edit: No-one hazarded a guess as to the film or the person. It was Woody Allen in "The Sleeper"

* Subject to Terms and Conditions, prize may be virtual or imaginary.