Wednesday, June 5, 2024

my main pc has now died on me c. 2007, 2014 and 2024. the first two times, i was able to force the bios into the board using the boot block (2007) and then a bus pirate (2014). the psu still works, but the fans aren't spinning at all. this is a worse problem than previously.

i don't know what happened. i woke up to a dead pc and it looked like somebody had ripped the power button out of the console. i don't know how the power button became disconnected from the console.

the machine has no wireless and is airgapped. the pentium d chip has no remote management part in the chip, which is what i've been trying to block access to because it's what they're trying to break into.  i know my landlords are trying to hack my network. it seems obvious that they bricked it when i was asleep.

yeah. 

either they shorted it or they tried to flash it and it bricked. i don't know yet. i can't fix it if it's shorted, but i can maybe reprogram it.

this was an expensive pc when i bought it, but it would not be expensive to replace it, although i would need to be very particular about it. the applications running on this machine cannot use multicore processors well. this blazing fast pentium D, with 2x3.8, is going to perform better using these applications than a newer quadcore is, which is counter-intuitive but why i built the thing the way i did and why i bought a quadcore for the video editing machine and not the recording machine.

the fact that you can't hack this processor is also a benefit i'd like to keep.

i blogged what happened the last time the machine wouldn't post, in march and april of 2014: 

i thought i saved that site but i can't find it now. i'd like to find it again.