Tuesday 19 December 2006

Pic of the day: But I can tell you where I pulled my video cards out from. In fact, today's entry is all about that! I guess it also counts as a Final Approach of sorts...

There goes the video card

The nerve-wracking noise from my computer came from the fan on the video card. Once I removed that card, the computer was quite silent. Unfortunately, it was also quite useless, since this computer does not come with a video chipset on its motherboard. But at least I could turn it on and confirm that the computer was once again silent. The logical conclusion was to hand in the card, not the computer, for repair. This I did today.

Since this is my main computer, which in practice has replaced several of my old computers, I did not willingly give it up. I came up with this awesome idea, though. In the old Windows ME computer, there is a video card from around they year 2000, a GeForce 2. I first bought it to play Dark Age of Camelot, back when that game was new, because the primitive graphics chipset on my computer caused me to disconnect from the Internet when there was too much new content, such as while riding from one town to another. I bought a newer card, a GeForce 3 Ti, when the first expansion pack came to my home in January 2003. (At which point I also had to buy a new computer because the new card did not work in the old one.)

Well, the old card works in newer computers, even if not the other way around. So I took it out of the five year old computer and put it in the 9 months old computer. It did not fit in the same slot as the card I had handed in at North Corporation. Modern computers have special slots for graphics cards, and the modern graphics cards only fit in such slots. But the old card fit in one of the generic card slots which can be used for anything, not that people use cards for much else than graphics these days, in my experience. Well, perhaps hardcore geeks. Perhaps I used to be a hardcore geek in the past, when I filled every available card slot in my computer with video card, sound card, i/o card, SCSI card... But enough about that. The thing is, it worked. Mysteriously the ancient card from the dawn of the millennium worked like a charm, once I downloaded an appropriate driver from the Internet. (Before the driver, it still worked, but very sluggishly.)

And so everyone is happy, for a short time. Little do I know what is going to happen to my computer on my birthday, only 8 days from now.