Another rant about computers....old ones.

Monsieur Beep recently retired his cherished old computer loaded with Millennium Edition, or at least he took it off-line, in favour of newer equipment. Maybe that's what I ought to be considering, after my recent adventures with this old 'whitebox' PC that has the XP Professional on it.

Over the years, I've loaded it up with a long list of programs; to be exact, 1.63 GB of them, in 1,612 folders, containing 11,772 files. I know, because I've just put all that onto a DVD for safe-keeping.

Why? Because...after the past couple of weeks with this old rig, I got nervous about how and when I might be able to access that stuff if I wanted it. That's because a couple of weeks ago, Old Faithful suddenly started taking fits of not wanting to boot up without several repeated attempts, and then those got more prolonged, with less running time between, until finally, I just couldn't coax it into loading its Windows at all. So I took it to the shop, just in time for it to sit there while the computer guru took a week off for a bit of a holiday. Good thing I have another computer now.

Dwight sent me an email yesterday to say he had it up and running for most of two days and could not find anything really wrong with it. That's not been my experience with it lately. I brought it home, connected all the wiring, and then spent hours trying to get it to first of all start up, and then stay running for more than two or three minutes without 'freezing' in the midst of something.
During all that, I was also frantically searching the web on the other computer for bits of good advice I'd remembered seeing on there recently. Some said it must be the BIOS, but mine is right up to date. Others said check the CMOS Battery, which needs to have more than 2.5 volts - mine's got 3.13 volts yet, so that's OK. And someone else said he'd solved a mystery like this once by taking out all of his RAM, and carefully cleaning all those dozens of little contacts with an ink eraser, and then wiping away the particles of it, before replacing the RAM carefully in its slots.

I removed that little lithium battery and cleaned its contacts while checking it for voltage, and then I removed both strips of 512 MB RAM, polished their contacts, dusted out their sockets, and then carefully clamped them back in again. Then, I dusted out the CPU fan while I was in there. Making a long story short, I don't know what I did that fixed the problem, but since I got it up and running again, it hasn't gone into a 'freeze-up' since - so I'm going to call it "fixed" until I find otherwise.

I haven't any idea why cleaning the contacts on bars of RAM would stop the rig from freezing up in the middle of doing things, but it seems to have something to do with it. And my boot-up problems were definitely related to that CMOS battery, which seemed to be a bit insecure in its mount when I pulled it out for testing. One expert said if you remove that battery in an older machine, you lose all the BIOS data it stores on its chip. Luckily, this one of mine is new enough that it isn't like that. It hunts in the hard-drive for backups of that, and then will start up once you've replaced the battery again. All of which, I've just learned the hard way. Just passing this along in case anyone finds it helpful.