CL

I try to make "milestone" post a little special; in this case, it is my 150th post, so I've decided to go with "CL" as the title... CL being 150 rendered in Roman numerals.

Big news on the technology homefront. Jennifer has been without a computer for nearly a year. Well, not actually without a computer- she has a very nice Lenovo laptop that she uses. Her desktop expired in May or June of 2014, however. We built her a desktop sometime in June or July, but we had a problem with the motherboard, so she's been using the laptop ever since then. Two Wednesdays ago, Mr. T decided that we should rectify the situation.

We replaced the motherboard.

Now, the odd part about those four words is this:

Mr. T and I were able to get together to get the job done... almost done, that is.  It didn't work- some of the fans spun up, but otherwise the PC was inert. Last Sunday, we took a fresh look at the machine. Mr. T suggested I take a look inside. I did. Much to his surprise, I started touching things- fans, jacks, cables, anything that we had attached. I may not have an A+ certification, but I know my way around a motherboard. And I actually saw the problem before I touched it: one of the memory sticks was not seated. I pushed it down until it clicked into place, and we were in business.

Everyone was happy.

Bouyed by his construction success, Mr. T called in a chit. A year or so ago, we had informally promised Mr. T a new computer after Jennifer got a new PC. With hers being nonfunctional for such a long time, we didn't have to make good on that promise. Now, though, having demonstrated his ability to build, it was time.

After a few configurations, he was finally able to put together a nice Intel-based I5 system and get everything through Newegg. Everything arrived on Friday. Mr. T got up early on Saturday, had a nice breakfast, and for six hours worked on the box.

No go.

As Bill Clinton once famously stated, "I worked harder than I did in my entire life".  Well, with apologies to the former president, its pretty close to what he said.

Frustrated, he asked me if I would look at it with him today (Sunday) Sure, that's what Dads are for.

We opened it up, and pretty much repeated the diagnostic process of the past Sunday. I had to laugh- Mr. T had admonished me for equipping Jennifer's CPU with a masive dual fan equipped heatsink; it turns out that his is just as huge! We poked and prodded for about an hour. The main issue with his box was that the main case fan would not power up.There was also a boot order issue, but we found a work around for that. After testing, we determined that there was a dead terminal on the motherboard. I have to say I was impressed with the quick response I received from Newegg. I went to their chat, entered my issue, and in about 10 minutes I had an RMA.

Jennifer's PC, on the other hand, required a bit of work. After a few days with a new motherboard, I realized that it had a problem: it would not install Windows updates. I finally figured out that Windows 7 needed to be reinstalled. Once that happened, the machine ran flawlessly.

Sorry, once again no data, but a lot of hardware- that's how I roll when I'm the I.T. guy! I did start working on a spreadsheet which will be imported as a table into the new database, and did a bit of Python work as well.

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.