I want to cry. If you were savvy enough to read between the lines of my cryptic posts about a project, that’s me talking about my computer I’m building for my FIL. Well the thing Totally ate itself. Here’s what happened.

I got everything put together easily enough. Chip on. Cooling fan on top of chip easy as pie (with hubbies strength to lock it in place). Modem in. Ram in. Hard drive in. CD that came with the case out and CD-R in. Snafu there… couldn’t find the port for the media card reader, though I found that later while trying to fix the big error. So I got everything put in, plugged into proper places, and was ready to move onto step two… loading an OS.

Well we’re loading Winblows. Because as crappy as it is, it will be easy for my FIL to use, and hopefully not break. If he does break it, hopefully easy for him to get fixed local in his small NJ town. We can’t jaunt up there four and a half hours (no traffic) just to fix his bloody computer when he fubarres it. And trust me, he would. He’s exceedingly not techie. He needs something that’s not only point and click, but something that does everything without him doing any work. Trust me, if there were an OS that was better and still easy for him to use, I’d go for it. I hate winblows more and more each day.

Well so we have a little bit of difficulty getting the hard drive and cd to communicate and all, but we get the hard drive formatted and start the process. It’s copying files prior to the actual setup process when Caramon comes home from school. That’s right, Caramon. Nope, Joram did not come in. So I race to the school to find out where he is. (He got on the wrong bus, poor kid.) I leave everyone at home watching the machine and ready to tell it to move to the next step if need be.

I get home and it is has hung up. Apparently it wanted to reboot itself after the copying. Um… OK. And then… nothing. We went into the bios but didn’t see anything wrong so we jus quit out of that. Nope didn’t make any changes. So we decide to try to reboot. Nothing. Boot with a boot disc. Nothing. We have now tried everything we can think of. Taking pieces off, one at a time. No dice. Swapping out parts with spare parts. Nada. We have no clue what it is.

No there’s no beeping. It has no built in speaker. Basically what happens is we turn it on. It powers up. The fan on the back whirs to life, as does the one on the cpu. The keyboard gets a flash of light saying “Yup, I’m here!” But that’s the end of that. The screen doesn’t even “wake up”. So I have no idea if it is doing anything or if it is hung on some operation.

I don’t know what to do. I broke it and I don’t know how to fix it. 😦 I’ve tried everything. Clearing the CMOS, unplugging everything, trying different parts. I just don’t know what the problem is.

*SIGH*

And of course Sir Megabyte was too busy tonight playing with some new program to help out a whole lot. Dad tried to help some but he’s at a loss as well. We checked out the motherboard too, I swear there is nothing wrong with anything! But it just doesn’t want to do anything!!

To top it off, I’ve got a stuffy nose and feel like blah. 😦