Hi,  it's been a while. I hope you are all well.  Not a great deal happening in the vaults of Baker Towers.
A few computer issues. I was getting random Blue Screen errors, and never the same one one twice. Reading the mini-dump files it always pointed to the kernel. I suspected memory, but it came up good when I ran MemTest86. I tried an OS repair. Still no improvement. Then it stopped posting altogether and would not even power on.  The last time I had that problem it was the P4 power connnector, so I pulled it off to reseat and saw it looked a little but burned.
  Aha.  An excuse to update the PC. New PSU, new motherboard. And of course, new processor and memory to go woth the new board. Grins, and orders up the bits.
  Then, one evening while waiting for everything to arrive, I though I would start taking it all apart. I pulled out the graphics card and spotted the CMOS reset jumper. Nothing venture, nothing gained, I reset the NVRAM and put it all back together.

 You can probably see where this is going.

 Powered it on, dived into the BIOS and adjusted the settings the way I like them and booted straight into Windows. It ran like new.

   The new bits arrived and I spent a happy day rebuilding the system and installing all the drivers for the new board and proc. It's a Core i5-2500.  It runs really cool, and is much more responsive than the old one.

   I now have enough bits left over to build another PC. That can be my test system.

 I suppose the moral of the story is, if you want a new PC, don't check too much. If you really can't afford it, try resetting the BIOS and reseating everything before you order the new bits.

  And as a wee addendum, I passed my CompTIA Network+ exam.  Then again, I have been doing all that stuff for years and could probably have written the book.  It would have been embarrassing to fail.


Life is good.

Ian