My computer problem turn out to be much less serious than I feared (old computer so I kind of expected the worst). Turned out the graphics card had come unseated. So obviously blank screen, and the loose connection may have made it freak out in other ways too. But after tightening that is seem be in working order once more.
Previous message for anyone curious:
As you know, I’ve been busier with the holidays and all, and now the last thing I wanted to deal with has occurred – my computer died.
Well, I say “died” but I don’t really know if it’s repairable yet. It’s not usable for now though.
And needless to say I can’t do much on the blog without my computer. (Posted this from my phone, but that’s about all I can manage from here.)
I will of course be doing my best to get back up and running but I’m not sure exactly how long that will take.
Well that’s a big relief!
This is why I never buy a CPU without onboard graphics, too useful for troubleshooting to be without, given the extra cost is minimal (at least on Intel).
Good tip. I also miss the internal speakers all PCs used to have. Some may still, not sure, but mine doesn’t. Used to be they would beep error codes to let you know what was wrong when all else failed.
Apparently Microsoft inexplicably discontinued support for it in Windows, and after that hardware makers stopped considering it an essential feature.
Many motherboards still have the header for the internal beeper (I won’t dignify it by calling what gets fitted a speaker) UEFI/BIOS tends to still support it at least on cheap boards where troubleshooting LEDs or 7 segment displays aren’t provided directly on the board, I generally plug one in when troubleshooting POST errors.
The beepers themselves are cheap, you’ll need you motherboard manual to determine which pair of pins to plug one in though if you want to hear possible beep codes.
Microsoft dropped support for using them as a sound output device because the sound produced is awful. Even in Windows 3.1 people would enable them, hear the noise, disable them again, & then either go buy a sound card or live without sound.
Well of course the sound was awful. But that wasn’t the point. It was still useful sometimes. For instance Skype (ironically also an MS product) used to have an option to beep the internal speaker when you got a call, so you could still hear it even if you had headphones plugged in (and not on your head).
Anyway, thanks again for the tip about possibly having pins for a speaker, I might check for that next time I have the case open.
So glad to see everything is up and running again.
Great news on the fix!
Stupid modern technology
Sorry to hear that. I hope you are able to sort out your PC woes and that you haven’t lost any data.