A long long time ago in a galaxy far away, I came home one day to find a full computer sitting in my garage, along with a box of sortware and extra parts. There was no explanation as to WHY this computer was in my garage, or WHO had put it there. This was quite mysterious but, thinking back, rather appropriate. It was eventually determined that a relative had left it there, as it was apparantly dead. At this point of time, I was no expert with anything in hardware, and in fact new very little, however, once i determined that the computer was indeed mine to keep, i took it to a friend who diagnosed it with a bad CMOS battery which he replaced with one from an old mobo. This was exactly the type of thing i needed to get familiar with computer hardware. It was a Dell Dimension 4100 (PIII 866 based) After upgrading it to Windows XP i succeeded in buying a semi-respectable graphics card which i am still using (FX5500) and borrowing some pc133 RAM. The computer was great for me. After I gained considerable knowledge of system building however I built my self my own Ath X64 based system. At this point I had little use for 'The Beast', as it had come to be known, especially as i had stolen some of its key components including its new grpahics card, its hard drive, its CD drive, and its moniter for my new system. A rummage through my friends piles of spare parts, however, soon supplied me replacements for these parts. (A 10gb hard drive, and a Radeon 9200) At this point, I gave the computer another fresh install of XP. This when things started to go awry. Not as if they hadn't before... The ide channels seemed to have switched themselves and which jumper settings would work was anybody's best guess, and was not consistant from system to system, or even when simply detaching and reattaching the same drive. The first truly peculiar thing to happen, though, was a BSOD. BSODs in various stages of the boot process were not uncommon, so I didn't think much of it at first. A physical memory dump. I still get these every now and then. But this one was different. Im not sure how a normal physical works precisely, but as far as I can tell the computer dumps aspects of the ram's contents to the hardrive, which only takes a portion of a second, after which the computer shuts down. But this time the computer decided to dump the entire contents of the ram, and possibly due to a hdd error, not to a file but to the SCREEN. It was really cool. Like the matrix. Some of the memory contents were obviously not in ASCII, but now and again readable fragments such as "Windows XP Pro" or other text, would scroll down the screen. Eventually i force-quit, and never had a similar problem with the machine. It was at this point that i gave the machine to a friend of mine. She has an incredible talent with electronics. They die spectacular deaths whenever they get near her. Unfortunately, the rest of the stroy is mostly secondhand. The computer was connected to her network, and I installed various software. Now the weirdest thing i have ever heard of happened. The computer apparently looked around on the network. With no apparent prompting or reason, it selected a folder. This folder contained pictures. With no further apparent promting, it selected a picture at random. This picture was not at the beginning of the folder, or the end of the folder, or even directly in the middle. The closest i can figure out is that this picture became set as the secondary desktop. The file had never even been on the computer. The problem is that the secondary desktop only appears sometimes at startup and shutdown, and then only on weirded out computers. This appeared at totally random times, such as but apparently not limited to while loading bars were displayed, when the screen totally refreshed it self (which it also did with or without reason), and at any other totally random times. This pictue could have been anyhthing. But the computer took a 6.1 megapixel shot of a POT. It did not display the photo at full size, nor fit to the screen, but of course, somewhere in between. It did not even focus on the center the picture. It rather seemed to have repositioned it slightly of to one side so that the pot, a large silver one, took up almost the entire screen. This would have been bizarre enough even if the computer had not started opening quicktime. But of course, it did. 6 or 7 copies a time. As the screen refreshed itself, almost as if the visual contents of the ram had been erased and were now being reloaded, the second desktop would load almost immedeately, followed at lengh by the regular desktop, some icons and: Quicktime video windows. At first when i heard this story, I did not beleive it. But I saw the computer, and indeed it was true. Seeing as my friend had even started dreaming about large silver pots, I took the computer back. I was never quite sure what to blame for the issues, but after a fresh install of XP I never had any problems that were particularly out of the ordinary with it again. It recently tolled its death knell with the malfunctioning of the motherboards keyboard and mouse support, which became nonexistant. Even though the machine has passed away, the legend of The Beast remains, and I just thought i'd pass it on. Any insight into such radical malfunctions would be appreciated.
12-Mar-2007, 01:54 AM
The Beast (More a story than a problem)
Linear Mode
