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Computer woes
Dec. 4th, 2005 02:55 pmGrr. I hate computer hardware. My problems go like this (non-geeks may skip without prejudice):
- on Thursday night, I discover that my on-board network adapter no longer works. I know it's this as I try it under both Windows 98 and Linux, neither of which detect the network. Yet the cable modem and cable are fine as it works ok when I plug it into Chris's computer instead.
- Saturday afternoon, I buy a PCI network card and plug it in. It won't install properly, and I am very frustrated, until I realise I've not pushed it in properly. Duh.
- I get it installed, and recognised, and then try again... but it still can't seem to contact the network under Windows 98. Similar-looking problem to before, but almost certainly a different cause.
- I boot into Linux, and... my graphics card no longer works. Basically it can't start up KDE/XWindows because there are 'no screens available'. wtf? Anyway, I try to use ping from the command line but it doesn't work. This isn't surprising as it couldn't initialise 'eth0' during boot anyway. So, no graphics, and no network. Linux is off the menu for the moment then.
- Back into Windows, and a check of the hardware settings. It appears that both my new network adapter and my GeForce graphics card are using IRQ 11. I wouldn't have thought this would be a problem, as it has all the IRQ steering stuff on there, but it would certainly explain why the graphics have suddenly stopped working under Linux and the network card doesn't respond to anything.
So, um, does anybody have any suggestions? I figure moving things from one PCI slot to another will change the assigned IRQ numbers, but that'll probably just move the problem. eg. I could swap my sound card with the network card but then maybe sound won't work. I only have 2 PCI slots so there are none free. Aargh.
Update: rather optimistically I thought that removing the new network card and setting things back to how they were before would fix Linux. Nope. So now I'm back where I was when it first broke, but can't get into the GUI on Linux any more. This means I can't use my cd-writer to make backups because Windows stopped recognising my cd-writer months back. Grrrrrrrrrrrr.
- on Thursday night, I discover that my on-board network adapter no longer works. I know it's this as I try it under both Windows 98 and Linux, neither of which detect the network. Yet the cable modem and cable are fine as it works ok when I plug it into Chris's computer instead.
- Saturday afternoon, I buy a PCI network card and plug it in. It won't install properly, and I am very frustrated, until I realise I've not pushed it in properly. Duh.
- I get it installed, and recognised, and then try again... but it still can't seem to contact the network under Windows 98. Similar-looking problem to before, but almost certainly a different cause.
- I boot into Linux, and... my graphics card no longer works. Basically it can't start up KDE/XWindows because there are 'no screens available'. wtf? Anyway, I try to use ping from the command line but it doesn't work. This isn't surprising as it couldn't initialise 'eth0' during boot anyway. So, no graphics, and no network. Linux is off the menu for the moment then.
- Back into Windows, and a check of the hardware settings. It appears that both my new network adapter and my GeForce graphics card are using IRQ 11. I wouldn't have thought this would be a problem, as it has all the IRQ steering stuff on there, but it would certainly explain why the graphics have suddenly stopped working under Linux and the network card doesn't respond to anything.
So, um, does anybody have any suggestions? I figure moving things from one PCI slot to another will change the assigned IRQ numbers, but that'll probably just move the problem. eg. I could swap my sound card with the network card but then maybe sound won't work. I only have 2 PCI slots so there are none free. Aargh.
Update: rather optimistically I thought that removing the new network card and setting things back to how they were before would fix Linux. Nope. So now I'm back where I was when it first broke, but can't get into the GUI on Linux any more. This means I can't use my cd-writer to make backups because Windows stopped recognising my cd-writer months back. Grrrrrrrrrrrr.
