Preparations

[Willy]

I'm doing a lot of flight testing and tweaking on the panel and this afternoon and evening were spent on computer maintenance. Blew it out with canned air, cleaned up the registry, defrag hard drives, etc. I figure that Gee Bee is difficult enough without having comp problems popping up.

[EasyEd]

Hey All,

So late 2003 I buy computer components - put together in early mid 2004. Computer died last sunday so over 10 years use. Am looking at a lot more maintenance than Willy. I can probably make it work again as it may be the PS or switch but thinking maybe it is time to let it go. Course I have a lot of files to get but I think I can do that just time consuming. It was old slow XP etc. Considering Mac Mini intel iris graphics with a bootcamp dual boot Windows/Mac and a Terabyte drive 16 gigs RAM 2.8 I5 and use of my keyboard and monitor and joy stick for now. Still looking into it. Any red flags with this idea? Intel Iris graphics run FS9 and maybe I'll go to X (I do have it) - OK?

Thinking I want to go reasonable good desktop see if I like Mac since I do photographic stuff and when tablets a bit more capable add one rather than just doing the "powerful" laptop plug everything in bit.

I'll enter the race but may not fly for a bit. My wife is lettin me use her comp to post this.

Definitely a bummer but maybe a blessing in disguise.

-Ed-

[Great Ozzie]

(oops I thought you were asking about troubleshooting... the price you pay for posting before the first cup of joe)

Hi Ed,

Power supply a good guess...

You can also eyeball all the capacitors on the motherboard (w/ a flashlight maybe) and see if any are bulging / ruptured (oozing goo).

-Rob

[EasyEd]

Hey All,

Ok so I lied - kind of...

My 10+ year-old computer roared back to life. I spent near a week looking at options from mac mini's to imacs to windows desktops to laptops. Was at the end looking at building a windows 7 based powerful (like 36ish inch 4k video powerful) desktop and adding a tablet like surface pro 3 eventually. I decided to look inside my computer's case to see what I would save and right away started vacuuming up an incredible amount of dust where upon I saw a motherboard light was on! So I have power! I then kept cleaning and noticed that a small circuit board with two front USB ports was loose and flopping around. I wrapped that around some rubber covered cables so it can't even try to short and lo and behold the computer started right up. Back in business! So will enter the race in FS9. The whole process has me clearly thinking I do need to upgrade this computer no matter how resilient it is - it is just old and weak in comparison to what I was looking at (and future needs) but a testament to choosing components carefully.

Thank You for the suggestions OZ but I stumbled across what was up.

-Ed-

[Ron Attwood]

That's not the EasyEd that raced on Deadmen Racing (LFS) is it? If it is, I used to be Doorman. In fact, if it isn't I still used to be Doorman! :biggrin-new:

And clear your messages, you're full up! :wink: