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I can remember some years ago talking to the Help Desk Team at one company about a year after we had deployed Windows 2000. One of the Team Leaders made an interesting observation along the lines that Windows 2000 had de-skilled his job because it was so reliable.

Whilst we laughed about it, there was more than a bit of truth in his statement because when I started in the IT Industry, it was a world of DOS with 16 bit Windows x3 sitting on top of it and PC Support required wearing a pointed black hat, long black flowing robe with Moon and stars motifs plus most important of all, a ‘Magic Wand’, IT was a ‘black art’…

The Way It Used to Be…

In the days prior to Windows 95, you spent a lot of time writing ‘batch files’ in DOS which were really a list of commands you wanted the PC to perform on boot up. The dreaded .BAT files had to be written correctly with the commands in the correct sequence, there was no “plug and play”, if you wanted to use a CD, you had to tell the PC it had one in the first place.

The advent of Windows 95 ushered in a new though not perfect age, “Plug and Pray” had arrived but even so, the World of 16 bit computing required a lot of effort and software rebuilds – trashing the machine and re-installing the software completely was a very common event.

It reminded me of the first car I had, a second hand Morris 1100 . The Morris had a whole series of ‘issues’ which I quickly got to know like the petrol pump would sometimes ‘stick’ the car stop, a judicious placed thump with the wheel brace on the underside of the car, solved the problem. IT in the days of DOS was a bit like that…

A Belated Christmas/Birthday Present…

A couple of friends who are in IT, asked me what I would like for my Birthday/Christmas present and I said a mid to high end graphics card but not a “Games Card”. What is a ‘games card’ well they are very high powered and rather expensive at around £200-£300 a time and although I admire the graphics, I don’t play computer games. The reason I wanted a better graphics card was simply that the latest version of Adobe Photoshop can take advantage of the hardware in rendering large images.

So last week, my present turned up in the shape of an ATI Radeon HD4850 which is a very capable graphics card indeed. Keen to see the impact on Photoshop, I had the case of the PC open and the cards swapped over in no time at all. Unfortunately, the new card which needed its own power supply feed, seemed to kill my Quad Core Vista PC, it would start to boot and then cut out, oh joy !

My conclusion was that the power supply wasn’t man enough for the job so, I ordered a new more powerful one which turned up a few days later when of course, I was busy. I managed to make the time to change the psu over but still the same thing happened so I decided to leave it for a few days when I would strip the thing apart and physically build it back up again.

Then on Sunday…

My eldest son Sean is an IT Manager of a large school, he is someone who has what I have always called “thinking hands”. He can pick up a bit of hardware or machinery that he’s never seen before and somehow very quickly understand how it works and be able to strip it apart and reassemble it, an amazing talent.

Anyway, he popped over on Sunday to drop off a Dell Server he had put together for me and whilst he was at it, looked at my dead Vista PC. We ran through some basic diagnostics and then he spotted what turned out to be the problem which was nothing to do with Vista or the new graphics card.

The CPU chucks out a lot of heat so it has a fan attached to it which in the Intel design is secured with 4 spring loaded ‘legs’ one of which wasn’t fully ‘home’ so that the surface of the fan wasn’t fully in contact with the surface of the processor. The CPU should run between 30-40 C, but because of this was hitting +100 C which was triggering an auto shut down to prevent damage.

The CPU was not in an area of the PC that I touched in changing the cards over so how it came loose I have no idea but clearly it did but how odd. It just goes to show that you get taught new or are reminded of old lessons often, in the course of a lifetime.