My Sims Machine Died (and what I did about it)
 

Well, I really did it this time. I installed a new power supply and graphics card in my Sims machine today. To keep a long story short: Now the thing won't boot up.

I've tried all the obvious things, including reinstalling the original power supply and video card and trying all the possible combinations of old and new. Now matter what, all I see on the screen is a rapidly blinking cursor in the upper left-hand corner.

When I first power on, I see the disk light come on for a while and hear the disks spinning. Then they stop and I'm left staring at that blinking cursor. I have no idea what what the problem is or how to figure it out. Maybe I messed up the ribbon cable to the disk drives. Maybe the new power supply fried the mother board. Maybe the new graphics card killed it.

I could find a computer repair shop and see if they can fix it, but I fear that the cost of repair would exceed the value of the machine. :thinking:


So, anybody got any suggestions? If I'm going to give up and buy a new machine, I want one with a BIG case, big enough to work in. These little hp cases are great as long as you never intend to open them! :laugh:

I'd try finding a computer repair shop and see if they can give you an estimate for $20 or so. I think that's about what the repair department at Staples charges. That way, you'll know which pieces are good (and bad), and you can install (or have them installed) into your new puter if needed and appropriate. And if you've just got the ribbon cable backwards, they'll hook it up right and politely snicker at you as you carry your newly fixed puter back to your car.

If you do need a new 'puter, definitely get one with a big tower case, especially if you're going to mount your existing drive as a slave drive.

Does this hint from Shorty help any?

Thanks, Rose. I'm sure it's not having a ribbon cable backwards because I didn't disconnect the ribbon cables. I had to move them around a lot to fit the new power supply into the case, which is why that's on my list of things I might have damaged.

No, that hint from Shorty won't help. It never gets to the BIOS stuff.

If I had a Windows boot disk on CD I could probably learn more about what's wrong, but I don't. Dang it.

Hm, that might be a clue...
1) Make sure the ribbon cables are plugged in tight to the drive(s) and the mother board..
2) Make sure none of the 40 or 80 wires in the ribbon cable are visibly broken where they go into one of the 3 plugs.
3) Make sure the three wire power cables are plugged in tight (to everything, not just the drives).
4) Make sure the video card is properly seated. (Yes, I did that once. But I didn't even get a cursor.)

Thanks for the checklist, Rose! It didn't find the problem but at least it's a start!

Frustrated with working inside this tiny hp box and outdated technology, I decided to go for an alternative solution:

Box: Antec P182 Case with Gun Metal Black Finish
- External Fan Controller
- 3 120 mm TriCool Fans
Here's a nifty review on Overclockers Online with step by step photos.

Mother Board: ASUS M3A32-MVP Deluxe WiFi-AP Edition

Video Card: ATI VisionTek Radeon 3850 512 GDDR3 PCIE

Brain: AMD Phenom X4 9500
- Quad Core 2.2 GHz
- 4MB L3 Cache
- Hypertransport 3.0 (Whatever that is.)

RAM: 2 GB Kingston Dual Hyper X PC2-8500 1066 MHz

Hard Drive: Seagate SATA/300 750 Gigabytes with 16 MB Cache

CD: Pioneer DVR-2810

Power Supply: Coolmaster Extreme Power 550 W

System: Windows Vista Home Edition

Now I just have to put it all together! :laugh:


Erm... and then reinstall all my software, and then see if I can scavenge some parts from the ol' hp box.

Well, except for the Vista, it looks like one hot machine!

(Of course, I'm running Win98 on my second puter...)

I'm certainly hoping it will be once I get it all put together! :lol:

I would have it all assembled by now if I knew what I was doing; but since I don't, I'm stopping to read all the manuals. :thinking:

At this point, I have the power supply installed. I was going to go for the mother board tonight, too, but chickened out.

Umm. Too late now, but, it sounds like memory to me.
Sounds like a memory chip got dis-lodged.

It sure seems like you have a nice shiny new super-puter coming along Greg.

And it seems it is that time again.

Ditto Although mine is "new" old stock, to match my socket 754 AMD CPU.
New Gigabyte nForce3 M\B, 2 Gb of PC 3200 @ 400 Mhz, 6800 NX graphics, and my same old 3400 Athlon CPU.
It's all the fastest that was made for that style machine. Good enough.

Your new toy sounds like she'll do the trick for a while yet. Have fun with it.

It's not really too late, Shorty. I haven't done anything irreversible to the old machine so I might still fiddle with it. Once I have copied all the stuff I want from its hard drive I could put that drive back in the old machine and keep trying things to see if I can get it running again.

After all, it's still one heck of a machine. Assuming that I can get the new machine going and configured the way I want, I could use the old machine as the guinea pig that I have been daydreaming about for a long time. I could install the whole game with all the expansion packs without worrying about messing up my little universe. :D

Progress Report: I just got the really scary part! I'm about to install the CPU! Eeeeek!

Since it will be next to impossible to read what's written on the CPU once I have installed it, I thought I'd make a note here just in case some day I really care.

AMD Phenom
HD9500WCJ4BGD
CAAWB AA 0749CPMW
1937818L70093

DIFFUSED IN GERMANY
(I wonder what that means. :thinking:)
MADE IN MAYASIA

Progress Report: The new machine now has a brain! (How many people have been tempted to name their computers "Scarecrow" because of this?) The CPU has an incredible heat sink and a fan that once would have been the only fan in the whole computer.

Here's an oddity. Section 2.3.3 of the manual for the mother board says:

Install the optional fan only if you are using a passive cooler or a water cooler. Installing the optional fan with an active CPU cooler will interfere with the airflow and destabilize the system.

I don't plan to install a water cooler (or a coffee pot, for that matter). If I were planning to experiment with overclocking this machine that might be a consideration but I just want to get a main machine going that will run Photoshop, Solidworks, and The Sims 2 without glitches. Everything else I do with my machine could easily be handled by a system I could buy off the shelf for $400.

By "a passive cooler" I'm guessing that they mean a heat sink without a fan, so I don't think I have one of those, either. Which means I will not install the optional fan.


Now for the memory. It says here on the packaging:

KHX8500D2K2/2GR

I'm sure that means something to someone. The amusing part is that after installing the memory, I get to install a heat sink for it that would cool the better part of lower Manhattan! :lol:

Lol, try reading something under a strapped on fan. No can do!

And yes, the CPU fan is as important as the CPU itself. That's what was wrong with my Win98 machine... the fan was dead, so the CPU turned the whole machine off when it got too hot.

Slot fans and extra case fans are good too.

BTW, a water cooler is to cool the computer, not water for you to drink.

Phil sez you might actually need a bigger fan for the CPU. Bundlers tend to get cheap with the fan.

I dunno; this is a pretty honking great fan sitting atop a model of the Detroit skyline. :thinking:

On top of that, the case itself has three 5" fans. Amusingly, those fans all have speed controls that can be set to L, M, or H.


Progress Report: The memory is installed along with its great massive pile of copper, the ASUS Cool Mempipe.

The honking huge graphics card is in, too. Did I mention that it has its own fan and heat pipe? It also has a picture of a pretty lady emblazoned on the red plastic ducting for the heat pipe. It looks cool; kind of a shame to hide it inside a box where the pretty lady will be gazing down upon the power supply. Maybe I'll create a sim for her and name her Heather Pipe. That took quite a while because I stopped to read the manual and even to use this machine to look up the documentation that came on a CD.

Hooking up power to the mother board was an adventure because the 12-volt connector had to stretch over the top of the graphics card. I needed to do a bit of cable management and pull the wires pretty tight to get the 4-pin connector to reach.

The 24-pin power connector was yet another little adventure. This whizbang Cooler Master 550-watt power supply has 20+4 connectors for that, and I paused to check all the pinouts to make sure I had the 20-pin and 4-pin connectors arranged correctly. Then I discovered that there was only one way they would fit. Silly me.

The hardest part continues to be the fear that I'll spend all this money and time on it, only to find out that it doesn't work. At least if that happens I won't be embarrassed taking it to an expert. This is the kind of system that's meant to be fiddled with!

So... what's next? I'm running out of boxes to open so it must be time to install the hard drive and CD drive. Then I have to hook up all the little fiddly bits. I wish I had a checklist for the fiddly bits but I can't find out; I'll have to figure it out on my own.

This sounds like so much fun! I'm going to be building a new desktop over the next few months (after income tax refund, then buying a piece at a time till I have everything) and I'm sooo looking forward to it! I rebuilt the second computer I owned till it was more or less a whole new computer except for the case and floppy drive. :P Never have built one from the ground up, but it's really not that hard. I was hoping to rebuild my dad's Vaio that he gave me, but the case is designed to fit ONLY Vaio motherboards and power supplies. I will probably steal the DVD burner and one of the hard drives out of it when I get ready to build, but I'm gonna have to get everything else new. Now that I'm driving locally, I can actually get some use out of a desktop again!

This is the first homebuilt computer that I have assembled since about 1976 so it's all new to me!

At the moment, I'm stymied by trying to figure out how to get the closeout panel out of the optical drive bay. I have a Pioneer DVR-2810 identical to the one shown on Overclockers Online. Obviously Nivedh Manohar (the fellow who wrote the review) managed to get it out but I sure don't see what's holding those parts in! :lol:

At least that picture showed me how to install the rails that go on the sides of the optical drive. I was clueless until I saw Nivedh's picture.

Aha! Figured it out!

I inserted the nail of my right thumb into the rectangular opening on the left side of the plastic opening and pulled it very hard to the right. That bent the plastic bezel enough that the plastic latches on the left side let go and it came right out.

The metal bezel behind the plastic is trickier. That is a knockout lug, cut from the solid steel sheet metal. The only way to get it out is to push at the bottom or top and make it twist until the metal breaks. It's like working with the knockouts in an electrical box.

Once the bezels were out, the DVR drive slid right in from the front and latched into place. (The latches are part of the side rails that I installed. They came with the Antec P182 case.)

My puter has a big round window in the side of the case and a fan with blue leds right in the middle of the window. Your pretty lady was probably designed to go in a case like that with a lighted slot fan (or a mini-florescent) right by her.

Lol, we've had that problem too, so we always get an extra power cable or a extra-long power cable, depending if we need the extra connectors for the extra drives or not.

Hmm. I reckon you're right about water cooling.

No way good enough for that beastie.

What that needs to stay cool is the new refrigerated CPU cooling.

Not joking, there is now available, tiny, 12 volt Domestic Automatic Refrigerated CPU cooling, that fits in a drive bay.

Not for beer, but to keep your "puter's" head cool.