Hello All,

This really isn't directly about Flight Simulators but more about old computer hardware.
My Development Computer has had intermittent failures for a couple years now.
The video would occasionally do some really strange things and the computer would sometimes lock up for no reason.
A reboot would cure most of the issues but sometimes programs just would not run, crash to the desktop or fail with an "Access Violation".

A few days ago, I had installed a fresh copy of Window 98 Second Edition (Yes, Window Nine-Eight) on a spare hard drive in order to have a clean copy of the OS to pull pieces from.
I had run the W98 "System File Checker" Utility and it was flagging about 8-10 files as corrupted.
Having the original installation media did not help; the SFC utility was not smart enough to pull from there or the operator was not smart enough to make that happen.

I had also had a Hard Drive failure on my Game Machine, so until I could find a new HDD that was large enough, I really could not even begin to rebuild the Game Machine.
What I had was a functional CPU minus a large enough working Hard Disk Drive so I decided to use it to test installations of Window 98 and Windows 2000 on very small and very old HDDs.

In the thread "Conspicuous by Their Absence", my last entry was about the failure of my Voodoo 3 3000 graphics card.
This happened almost immediately after I had replaced all the files flagged by SFC. The video was still behaving strangely, but most programs were running pretty reliably at this point.... As long as the screen did not lock up.

The next thing that happened was that in the middle of a session, the screen flickered and then went black.
A cold reboot did not help. The screen remained black with no display although the beeps could be heard as the SCSI controller went through its startup cycle.

A day later, I decided to try to start up the computer again.
This time, the BIOS display came on a usual, but about 5 seconds later, the screen was filled with random character blocks before the display went out completely.
Waiting a few hours and attempting to boot the computer did not help; There was no display at all.

The soap opera gets even more messy now.
I ordered a replacement Graphics Card. It arrived today but did not work in any of the machines I tried it in.
What was even more interesting was that the Voodoo 3 3000 appears to function (mostly) when installed in my Game Machine as does another spare Graphics Card but the new (really just new to me) Graphics Card does not work in anything.
On the Development Computer there was no display with ANY of the Graphics Cards but I decided to see what would happen after the SCSI controllers went through their test cycle.
Nothing happened. Normally this computer would attempt to boot from its Floppy Drive and then make very distinctive sounds as it boots from the Hard Drives, but nothing....

Seems to me that I have a Motherboard failure instead of a Graphics Card failure at this point.

- Ivan.

So....