Things can only get better.....I hope!

[womble55]

I had just taken off from the Shetlands in my Warwick, set course for North Wales and as I was leveling out at 3000ft, boooof the screen went black. I run Windows ME and have had no problems like this before.
I first thought that the hard drive was gone, was no more etc etc.
The panic that there was a possibility that all my recent work was now inaccessible filled me with dread. I tried shutting it down and restarting but the dreaded blue screen of death made an appearance, to put the boot in it was in a foreign language as well.
Logic has now stepped in and a spare hard drive was fitted....phew it wasn't the hard drive, it seems as though its possibly the motherboard/video card.
I have a spare PC, (it had been thrown out for the dustman/thrashman by someone on a route I drive my bus on),but the drivers for the video on the motherboard aren't available so it works in 16bit at the moment. I've put the hard drive into this and I am now transferring the contents of my projects folder to the shed load of flash drives around the house.
My next thing to do is either get a video card for the old PC or one for the new PC, my sensible head is saying get one for the new PC but I got on so well with the old one.

[huub vink]

These are tough decisions! I recently had a similar one to make. I suddenly was looking at the blue screen we all hate to see. As my PC isn't that new anymore I had to decide whether to buy a new one or not. In the end I just replaced the broken video-card. I can't yet say whether this is the right decision or not. But I expect that replacing part by part keeps the money envolved more controlable and I expect some parts will last (nearly) for ever.

Good luck,
Huub

[Ivan]

My call has generally been to repair machines when something fails if I believe they are otherwise "reliable".
My development machine is still a Pentium 233 MMX for most of my aircraft projects although I use quite a few other machines to do the analysis, drawings and much of the flight testing. This Computer dates back to around 1997 and has been quite reliable except for a power supply fan failure a decade or so ago. I also chose to replace the original processor which was a Cyrix with a real live Pentium about that long ago. The video card is a Voodoo 3 3000 which I installed around 1999 or 2000 and it still works well enough. The power supply shows hints of wanting to fail again (doesn't always turn on the first time), and the fan is a touch noisy, but it pretty much does what I want.
In case you're wondering, this wasn't a low-end machine when I first assembled it. It has an Adaptec 2940 Fast Wide SCSI controller and one other SCSI controller on board and 18 GB was a LOT of disk back then.
I have also had two monitor replacements since this machine was first assembled.

My situation may be a bit different than yours. I tend to strip old machines for spares so it doesn't cost me much to repair an older machine. At the moment, I can probably come up with 2 or 3 video cards of various types for testing even without breaking down another machine. I have also come across older graphics cards in the thrift stores for $3 - $4 though I haven't bought any of those yet.

I have gone through a LOT of computers. Some like this old P233 stay around because they are reliable and do what I want. There are others that have come and gone since the P233 and were much faster but just a bit more temperamental.

A lot of the decision depends on whether this is your one and only computer or just one of several. I refuse to have just a single computer if I have the space to host more. I have children in the house and often they take over a couple of them when they want to play games or need to do school work.

- Ivan.

[smilo]

glad to hear that you didn't loose your work.
that would have been heart breaking.
if nothing else, this is a backup data lesson.

like Ivan, i have several machines
and components that ive collected over the years.
unfortunately, it costs more to ship
than it would be to buy a new part.

i would bet that a repair shop in your area
would have a used video card for cheap.
i don't know about your neighborhood,
but around here..over in the big city,
there are computer recycling centers
that sell used computer hardware.
it might be an option to look into.

[womble55]

To continue with the saga of my PCs, I have sourced a video card on eBay. The snag is it is in Canada at the moment, but for $10 and $11 shipping it's a bargain I can't turn down. I'll just have to wait six weeks for it to arrive and clear customs.
On Ivans advice on not having just one PC, I have sourced a Panasonic Toughbook for £8 ($13), a new HDD drive for the same, with a charging lead for a tad under $6, I have a good laptop for a total of £20 ($33). It took many hours of searching on Wendy's notebook to find this stuff, it is out there, thankfully.
Hopefully, I shall be up and running with the laptop at least within the week, its been a long time since I loaded Windows on to a new PC, wish me luck.

[womble55]

I have finally completed my flight from the Shetland Isles to Wales, the ATI Radeon card from Canada fitted my 'thrown out for the rubbish' PC and once the drivers were finally found after much digging around and the sequence of installing them was done, I could run CFS1 and AF99 properly. I didn't realise at the time of my PC death that it would be like losing a dear friend. My laptop has still to co-operate but I'm getting there. To cap it all, while looking for Video cards, I found somewhere that sells Compaq Evos, ( my old PC, RIP) for stupidly low money. £9 for one with no HDD or RAM, no problem. So glad to be back in the design shop, this has reinforced my resolve not to hoard projects at the doors of the paint shop but to get them through and onto the flight line

[Ivan]

Or better yet, just back up your projects.

I always have a flash drive plugged into the back of my development machine. Periodically, I even save a project to it. Strangely enough, I recently had a failure of the flash drive and had to replace it....

I also use a ATI Radeon 9000 on my other development machine which I almost never even turn on because the monitor is a little tiny 15 inch. (Hey, it was the only spare I had at the time!)

My laptop here has a ATI Radeon chipset as well and although I bought it for games, I have never even installed a flight sim on it. My son uses it for games fairly often though.

Glad you finished your flight. Hope it ended with a nice, uneventful landing!

Welcome Back!
- Ivan.