MikeBrum.com

Yesterday saw some computer issues.

I was sitting on my laptop watching some videos (that get pulled from my RAID array in my PC in the office) when the video player locked up. I tooled around with it for a bit, but couldn’t get things to play. When I went and inspected the PC in the office, it was totally unresponsive.

With nothing else to do, I hard booted it. After it came up, I had no video… so I booted it again. Still nada. On a whim, I switched one of the monitors from the video card to the onboard video that I never use – and that gave me signal (albeit at the lowest 4bit resolution that it could muster).

First thing that was giving me issues with the RAID array. My primary data array was in critical condition. The fix was easy (just booted into the RAID bios and told it to rebuild the array), but long. I spent the time reading The Watchmen.

That out of the way, on to the video. The short story is that no matter what I did, I was wholly unable to get the video card to get recognized and couldn’t get anything more than the lowest possible resolution (less than 600×800) to display from the onboard adapter.

I’m not sure if the whole AGP bus is fried or what.

What I do know is that I need a good machine that I can run PhotoShop on, since that’s what I use for image processing. My other box, which has nice hardware, is a linux box – so that’s out of the question.

Bah.