Apparently my Dell decided to spontaneously work for some reason. I was tinkering around with it (it's slow at work and I was bored), thought I'd try taking out half the RAM to see if it made any difference because bad RAM is one of the possible sources of the problems. And after I powered on, it booted up and stayed running. So I let it run for a while - no problems. Then I put the other two RAM back in - no problems. Right now I'm running anti virus on it so it can have something kinda taxing going on rather than just idling to see if it gets stressed out and crashes again. But I have no idea why it's working now. Could be reseating the RAM did it. Could have been the video card was loose or something - I had to remove it to get to the RAM clips. Who knows. It still could be the hard drive is going out. Moving the PC around may have realigned something to let it work for now.
I'm still getting the PCAL even if the Dell continues working. For one thing, I just don't trust it anymore. I may have waited a couple of months to get the PCAL if the Dell hadn't died, but I was going to get it anyways. (The Dell crashed about two weeks AFTER I looked into PCAL, with the Dell crash I just became more interested in getting a music only PC).
It will be nice if the Dell works, then I won't have to use the PCAL for anything but music. The bad thing is I'll have to buy another monitor. The Dell can have a cheapo 19" or something. My 24" is going with the PCAL!
Let's not get ahead of ourselves though. I'm going to let the Dell run at least until closing, then all day tomorrow before I start to feel any confidence in it.
| Sun | M | Tu | W | Th | F | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | |
| 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 |
| 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
| 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 |
| 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |
Possibly know what's wrong with it
Ok, so the computer was running with all 4 sticks of RAM in it. However, I noticed it was only recognizing 2 of them. So I figured maybe I didn't install them in the right order or something. I took them all back out and installed them in the correct order. Guess what - blue screen! Then I took out RAM 2 & 4 again and it booted up. And since both RAM pairs had worked in slots 1 & 3, I think either RAM slot 2 or 4 is bad. Which means it's not something easy to fix, pretty much have to replace the MoBo, and that's more of a pain in the ass to replace. I can probably live with 2GB on the Dell since I won't be running all my synths on it.