h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Okay in reverse order (as in today backwards), the following disasters have occurred in the last week or two.

1) Last night, my PC rolled onto it's back and waved it's little legs in the air........(sob) all those saved games and cool wav files (sob).......

2) Spurs let in four goals in 11 minutes after Rob "Hey, why not play with 11 men, forget that red card" Harris got confused over a penalty.

3) The worst crime ever......managed to humiliate myself and embarrass someone important to me, and now the greatly reduced flow of email has a very frosty tone....

Can things possibly get any worse? I'm half-expecting to get home tonight and have some girl call me and say she's pregnant. Luckily (depending on your point of view), that's not too probable given my recent activities.......

Did it get worse, did it not get worse or are you still waiting?

Bad news Zeb, I'm pregnant...

ROFL

Nice one EV!

Thanks Joanna - it has improved, thankfully. My friendship seems to have been repaired, my pc hqas settled down somewhat (though is still prone to frequent errors or spontaneously rebooting, and seems slower than before - so still a replacement job.....), and Spurs are at least back in the top half of the table with two wins and a draw.

How's life with you?

All PCs are prone to frequent errors and/or spontaneously rebooting, didn't you know?

This is abnormal. Potted history:

pc is 4 yrs old, cyrix P-200+ 150Mhz, 2MB Cirrus 2d card, Voodoo 1, SB PCI128, 32M ram

Voodoo suddenly stopped working one day - looked and sounded like an old SPeccy loading screen. 2d signal still going through, so I left it. Few weeks later, complete meltdown. Kept locking on startup - sometimes freezing after memory test, sometimes freezing after detecting PCI slots, never making Win95 even in safe mode.

Started going through command prompt to back up save games and wavs (not careless enough not to have all the docs already done!), started freezing on command prompt, corrupting screen and mb speaker going mental. Decided to leave it a few days.

In the middle of all that above, it had briefly booted ok with the voodoo out. I thought cool, put it back in to double-check whether or not it's fried. All went bad again.

Finally, voodoo out, few days later it was booting but the desktop kept crashing - I had my pc built and was never given the Win95 disk - so I'm thinking reinstall (hadn't been done for at least 3 yrs and the printer port had been without drivers for months). All of a sudden starts booting perfectly a few days later.

But: very slow - before I was playing Baldurs Gate no probs - now v' slow, unplayable. So I've gone baclk to old games I haven;t finished like Xcom TFTD and CM2 - and they play fine but keep either quitting to the desktop with a Protection Fault or Invalid Command, Blue Screen with VMM exceptions, or just sponataneously rebooting - as if I'd pressed reset.

I reckon either the processor or MB has somehow overheated and weakened somehting that keeps wigging out on me. Either way, mimnimum replacement is going to be MB, CPU, PSU and memory - i.e. new system time.

What do you think?

Have you tried hitting it with a big hammer?
Could be some kind of hardware conflict, but it seems strange that it just suddenly happened... could the games be running slower because you've taken the Voodoo card out?

That's what I thought - though I don't see how it would take any pressure off the CPU for Baldur's gate. No polygons, and none of the usual visual/audio indicators that the card's kicking in.

My mate has a spare Win95 cd he's sending me - I'm hoping a reinstall will sort it out......

I have a potential new one lined up anyway - my dad's old p2. Get top of the range 3d card in that and i'll be sorted.

I'm not sure that a re-install will make any difference... but I don't have any better ideas, so it's worth a try!

I'm just hoping it will put in all the piddly little bits that might have got lost over the years. It seems generally unstable and there are definitely a few odd files that have been corrupted.