Are You A Lamer?

Brian Mix

"Stupid piece of shit hard drive!" is a cry often herd form the computer whiz while trying to get two SCSI hard drives to work with two IDE hard drives. You keep getting drive not found error every other time, and every once and a while you get a Keyboard not found error as well. Finally after three hours of wiggling and plugging you finally realize that hour sound card is half unplugged which was causing all the errors the whole time. "Dammit", you shriek as you kick your zip disks across the room. This happened to me just last week and it all could have been avoided by following a few simple guidelines.

The first thing you have to remember while troubleshooting a computer is to start with the stupidest things, and work to the more complicated. This way you won’t end up tearing your entire computer limb from limb only to find that there was a screw on the motherboard shorting out a circuit. You should always make sure all the cables and power cords are securely pushed in, and all the cards are pushed in all the way. Then you can move on to harder stuff like conflicting IRQ’s and fun stuff like that.

Another important thing to remember a decision actually is to decide weather the problem is caused by hardware or software. If it is just software then you won’t even have to take the case off of your computer just dick around for a while and hopefully you will fix the problem. If it isn’t software then you can get out your anti static screwdrivers because it is time to kick some ass Conan style!

Now to thoroughly confuse you, I will now contradict everything I just said in the last paragraph and say that your mysterious problem may actually be both software and hardware. In this case the drivers may be at fault. The best way to battle with drivers is to do one of two things. First you can remove the object from your operating system and then reboot your machine. Let windows find it and configure it that way. If Windows didn’t find it, simply do it yourself with the Add new hardware program. The second thing you can do is to hop on the Internet and find the newest version of the drivers. I recommend doing this even if you’re not having problems just because it is always good to stay updated.

I think the best way to fix your PC is to just mess around with it until you finally find the problem. This way you will learn a lot about your computer and you will learn things what to do if you have a similar problem in the feature.

If you decide to follow these simple hints I think you will be greatly aided and will learn much faster as opposed to not following these simple steps. And above all else have fun and don’t let your computer get the best of you.