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Electronics
Jul. 23rd, 2019 08:50 amElectronics and I have had a difficult weekend.
I replaced the drive belts in my CD changer and it's working just fine! It's back in its place on my audio shelves and I used it for music while trying to fix my computer. (More on that later.)
I got the power supply board out of my dead monitor and replaced the six big electrolytics with the new ones. No luck. I opened it up again and reflowed my solder joints in case I had a bad one. I turned it on and one of the caps snap-crackle-popped. Dammit! I left the thing for most of the day while I worked on other stuff. That evening, in a better mood, I looked again. I'd soldered the popped cap in backwards. That was stupid. I thought I'd been working so carefully, but I managed to turn it around during installation somehow.
One at a time, I tried soldering in two of the old caps that matched the value and still looked ok and that made the monitor *almost* work. It powered up and showed the menu screen for a split second, then powered down again. That makes me think the problem is still the power supply board and that it might still be fixable, so I'm going to order a good cap to replace the one I blew up and give it one more try. I feel like I could just about reassemble that monitor blindfolded.
At this point, I could probably find a thrift store monitor to replace the one I've got and it would cost less. But it can be hard to find a 20" monitor with a stand that rotates to portrait mode. And I'm sick of having to throw stuff out when it stops working to get a new one and filling up landfills. If I can fix this one, I wanna fix it, dammit! And I must be learning from the process too, right?
---
I've been working on fixing a computer crash for a while. It looks like what happened is that my RAID 1 config got turned off in the BIOS (we won't mention that I'm the only person who could possibly have done that) so Windows was confused about booting and had to run it's self-diagnosis and repair. After that, I found that I had a J drive that wasn't there before, with all the same stuff as was on my C drive. My response to that reminds me of one of my favorite quotations from the guys at the hydraulic press channel on Youtube: "Wut da fook?" Then I realized what had happened and went back to the BIOS to fix the mirror. After a reboot, I got the classic "Invalid system disk" error, which I kind of feel like should be accompanied by a giant upraised middle finger, illustrating the situation you find yourself in when reading it. I think the whole mess must have started when I realized I didn't have analog sound because the hardware was disabled in BIOS. "Uh-oh," I said to Danae as I changed settings, "I'm in *advanced* mode. It's for real now." Little did I know...
So I got Windows 8 reinstalled, but it won't do Windows Updates. This seems to be a common problem, and maybe I wasn't getting updates even before the rebuild, but this time I wanted to fix it. I think fixing that mess of crap took longer than doing a rebuild, and it still isn't working right. I manually did all the updating using WSUS. So that's working again except for the software I need to reinstall to run things like my X-keys pad and my fancy mouse with three joysticks on it.
I replaced the drive belts in my CD changer and it's working just fine! It's back in its place on my audio shelves and I used it for music while trying to fix my computer. (More on that later.)
I got the power supply board out of my dead monitor and replaced the six big electrolytics with the new ones. No luck. I opened it up again and reflowed my solder joints in case I had a bad one. I turned it on and one of the caps snap-crackle-popped. Dammit! I left the thing for most of the day while I worked on other stuff. That evening, in a better mood, I looked again. I'd soldered the popped cap in backwards. That was stupid. I thought I'd been working so carefully, but I managed to turn it around during installation somehow.
One at a time, I tried soldering in two of the old caps that matched the value and still looked ok and that made the monitor *almost* work. It powered up and showed the menu screen for a split second, then powered down again. That makes me think the problem is still the power supply board and that it might still be fixable, so I'm going to order a good cap to replace the one I blew up and give it one more try. I feel like I could just about reassemble that monitor blindfolded.
At this point, I could probably find a thrift store monitor to replace the one I've got and it would cost less. But it can be hard to find a 20" monitor with a stand that rotates to portrait mode. And I'm sick of having to throw stuff out when it stops working to get a new one and filling up landfills. If I can fix this one, I wanna fix it, dammit! And I must be learning from the process too, right?
---
I've been working on fixing a computer crash for a while. It looks like what happened is that my RAID 1 config got turned off in the BIOS (we won't mention that I'm the only person who could possibly have done that) so Windows was confused about booting and had to run it's self-diagnosis and repair. After that, I found that I had a J drive that wasn't there before, with all the same stuff as was on my C drive. My response to that reminds me of one of my favorite quotations from the guys at the hydraulic press channel on Youtube: "Wut da fook?" Then I realized what had happened and went back to the BIOS to fix the mirror. After a reboot, I got the classic "Invalid system disk" error, which I kind of feel like should be accompanied by a giant upraised middle finger, illustrating the situation you find yourself in when reading it. I think the whole mess must have started when I realized I didn't have analog sound because the hardware was disabled in BIOS. "Uh-oh," I said to Danae as I changed settings, "I'm in *advanced* mode. It's for real now." Little did I know...
So I got Windows 8 reinstalled, but it won't do Windows Updates. This seems to be a common problem, and maybe I wasn't getting updates even before the rebuild, but this time I wanted to fix it. I think fixing that mess of crap took longer than doing a rebuild, and it still isn't working right. I manually did all the updating using WSUS. So that's working again except for the software I need to reinstall to run things like my X-keys pad and my fancy mouse with three joysticks on it.
