It just gets better every day.

[athelind]

This morning, upon booting up, I got a "CMOS Checksum Error" that stopped the boot-up. It gave me the option of entering the BIOS set-up menu, or just continuing with the boot. I entered the BIOS menu, quickly realized that, even if I was awake, I'd have no idea what I was looking for, and exited.

The system then proceeded to boot up normally.

I'm told that this could be the first sign of motherboard failure. Hooray! On the other claw, it could just be One Of Those Random Oddities that I'll never see again.

Frankly, this thing's probably been ready to go since I got it. It's always been kinda twitchy, and there just might be a reason for that. My old mobo just randomly died on me after we moved into our first apartment up here in San Jose. We replaced it -- and a few weeks later, the outlet I had my computer plugged into shorted out badly. I figure that the old mobo died because of an erratic outlet with dirty power, and this one was running in the same bad outlet for the first few weeks of its life.

That was 2003. Five years is old for ANY motherboard.

So... I need to shunt updated copies of all my job-hunting stuff onto the laptop today, in case this thing quits on me. Needless to say, replacing the motherboard until the job hunt is successful Just Ain't Gonna Happen.

This, incidentally, is an example of "Coyote Loves Me" -- a motherboard dying with no warning is a catastrophe. A motherboard dying with some advanced notice is an annoyance. Having that notice means that I can avoid the worst part of any unexpected systems failure: the stress, anger and panic on the operator side of the keyboard.

And that makes me happy.

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Comments

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

Are you sure you can't replace the mobo? I mean, a five year old mobo is gonna be really cheap. Like you said, five years is old for any motherboard. I have trouble imagining that you could find a used one for wicked cheap on Craigslist or whatever.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

WANT UPGRADE.

Would rather wait for job to get whole upgrade than to keep nickle-and-diming this thing.

If I get a new mobo, it WILL be more advanced than this one. No more wanna twitchy clunky old thing!

[wy.livejournal.com]

I'm sure it's just a dead CMOS battery. It's the little quarter-sized thing. A dead battery will lose your settings thus causing the CMOS error. Doesn't mean that you're losing your motherboard, just that a 5 year old battery needs replacing.

:P

Not that that's going to stop you from upgrading if that's what you WANT of course. *GRIN*

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Yeah, a CMOS battery was my first reaction, and conversations with some other folks also brought that up. The "HOLY COW DYING MOBO" was probably premature.

I'm gonna run out to Fry's today and get a new one.