The good news is that from once a total software person, I now know what all those ports on the back of a desktop computer are for. Who recalls that HP computer from ABC Thrift? Yes, that thing is still not fixed, and that is the tale for today. This is the unit that was donated in good, but non-working order. Since it was in such fine shape and had been working recently I thought it would be a good candidate for me to practice what I had hoped would be my newfound skills. Wrong.
I finally gave up, but only to the extent of tackling it on my own. It was the most perplexing problem. Every component worked fine but it would not boot up the operating system. Forty hours of following every instruction in the text plus the notes I’d made were not helping. It just sat there and said it did not recognize MSCD001. It would do this right after I had placed the CD into the tray. I was able to discover lots that did not work, so the time was not wasted. The owner had removed all the valuable parts except a single DIMM card, and replaced the hard drive (HDD) with a much smaller unit. Otherwise the computer should have worked. What do you think it was? (Yes, it is running now.)I studied from 6:00 AM until 4:00 PM and then took the computer in to school with me. The instructor was able to determine in BIOS that the HDD was second on a list that required it to be first. This area had not been covered in class. From that point onward, the progress was logical. First load the operating system, in this case Windows 98 SE. Then use another computer to download the NIC driver off the internet. This is a ‘can opener’, because once you get that connection, the drivers are free. First the video driver, then the sound card. This is the first computer that has been repaired from scratch in this class.
Am I happy? That depends. You see, I am glad the thing is finally running. I am not glad that I have not learned enough to even diagnose such problems, and the class is ¾ finished. There is no way I could have come close to fixing that computer, and yet the BIOS is the simplest part of the machine. If it is any consolation, nobody else in the class had any idea either. Why is it not one of us can troubleshoot BIOS yet? Does not that seem odd? Also, if we are to learn all these things, they must be scrunched into the next 2-1/2 weeks instead of spread over the entire two months. I was very afraid of just such a thing. No balance between lecture and lab, now the meaningful part of the course becomes a memory contest instead of a learning reinforcement event.
There was a curious twist. The instructor does not give notes or allow time to take them. I wrote it down anyway, so I was the only person to completely follow what he did in the repair process (of that HP Pavilion 7845 computer). Well, except for the guy who already knows the trade and is just there to get the certificate, Chris. Having notes to refer to is important, as some of the others are [finally] beginning to notice. I am also hitting up to 95% in some of the practice exams, but that is largely luck. Some of the other practice [exam] modules that I have not studied yet, I cannot even understand the questions.
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