I put my phone on silent early this morning when I went to bed.

I don't want to get woken up at 8am by the bloody phone like usually happens.

I half woke up about 9.40am, and heard the landline phone ringing (it's pretty quiet, so if I was asleep, I would probably sleep through it). I just ignored it.

My phone started silently ringing a little bit after that.

I answered it, it was my mate I built the PCs for on Tuesday night.

Apparently he had a computer he'd stuffed up while trying to fix a couple of days ago (deleted registry keys), and had reinstalled windows over the top, but it needed a couple of things sorting out.

He wanted to know if I was coming up to do it. He'd asked me about this earlier in the week at some point, and I recalled him saying I had to be at his place for 11am, no, apparently I had to be there for 10.30am, since the place where the pc was, was a 1/2 hour away.

It was now 9.45am, if I get up and get ready now, I can be at his place a couple of minutes after 10.30am.

I had a bunch of missed calls on my phone.. yep.. first call at 8.15am. Glad I turned the thing to silent.

It was my mate who I was supposed to be seeing this morning at 9.30am, to fix his internet. Because of the fact I found out there were issues on the server side, there was no point me going over there, since I wouldn't be able to fix it.

I called him, and told him that, and said I would get him moved on to my service on Monday, and would give him a call and tell him how to set it up on Monday night or something.

I got up, had a shower, got ready, and left.

Dad had moved the Jag up the driveway to work on something, so I had to do a 10 point turn to get out.

About halfway to my mate's place, I noticed a car that looked familiar, I pulled up closer, and I realised it was one of my mate's I'd been out with last night, who lives up near my mate I was going to see.

I pulled along side him going around a roundabout, and bipped my horn, but he didn't noticed, I followed him up the highway, and flashed my high beam at him a couple of times, but he still didn't notice.

We got to the traffic lights near the station before the long straight into where my mate lives, and I pulled up along side, and then he noticed me, he waved, I nodded at him, and then I took off, slipped up the side next to all the cars, and took off when the lights changed.

I got up to my mate's place about 10.45am.

I went in, he was just working on a PC someone had got him to do for them.

I went and had a look, some ancient compaq thing, with a 2 part motherboard, it had one mounted the opposite way to usual, with the cpu and ram on it, and then a mobo in the bottom of the tower, with the slots on it. Weird.

I'll bet this thing is only like a really late model 486 (it has PCI slots), or an early pentium, like a P60, or P75 or something.

Apparently the guy wanted a USB card in it, which my mate couldn't get going. I said that it was probably because the PCI slot will be early, like PCI revision 1.1 or whatever it was, and the manual for the USB card said it required a PCI 2. something revision slot, which this machine won't have.

We jumped in the car, to head up to fix the PC.

A couple of minutes later, my mate noticed he didn't have his wallet. So we had to go back to get it. I wouldn't have bothered myself, but he said he was worried about getting pulled over and not having his license. I said I would have just showed them the wallet with the ambulance service logo on it (because my mate is retired ambulance assistant superintendent or something similar), or it might have been like when my mate's wife got pulled over a couple of years ago, didn't have her license, was told she was a "silly billy", and to bring it to the station in the next day or so.

We went back and got it, and then headed up there.

The place was a little way up the coast, near the power station, it looks like a nice ride up here, I might have to come up here one weekend, but during the week, I get so sick of doing stuff, I just want to stay at home and do nothing on my time off.

We got there, about 11.20am, it was a trailer park, or "pre fabricated housing village" as it was referred to on some signs. Wow, I didn't know such things existed here.

It wasn't too bad, the places all looked respectible, with gardens and stuff. We parked, and then wandered down to the place where the people with the PC lived.

We went in, and looked at the PC, the woman complained about not being able to get on the internet, not being able to get any support, and not having anyone call her back when she did manage to get through.

I sat and looked at the pc.

It was a mess, files here and there, lookout took like 3 minutes to actually start.

I spent a few minutes working on it, and we decided to take the machine away, so I could back all the data up, rebuild it from scratch, and put the data back in. Should only take me a couple of hours.

We pulled the machine out, chatted to the people for a couple of minutes before we left, they want to change to my service when I get it running, so we talked about that.

We left, I carried the machine back to the car, and then we went back to my mate's place, got there a bit after midday, and setup the pc on the table.

His Chinese relatives were making lunch at this point, and since we were using the table, they said they would eat outside, it was a nice day anyway.

I got the machine setup, put an extra disk on it, partitioned it, and started backing up their data.

At this point I was told I had to come and eat lunch, because otherwise the noodles dry out.

It was noodles with some sort of a pork soup like thing, it looked fairly interesting. My mate said just put a little bit, in case you don't like it, but before I had a chance to do anything, one of his Chinese relatives had served it all up for me. Oh well, I'll eat anything, so I'm not too worried.

As I started to eat it, the Chinese relative told me that I can come to China, and stay in her house. Heh.

It was really nice food, one of the other Chinese relatives stood outside having a cigarette, and once he saw that I was enjoying it, he went in and told the others in Chinese that it I liked it.

(I can't speak Chinese or anything, but my mate has a fair idea of what they are up to most of the time, since he went and stayed in China with them for 6 months a couple of years ago, and he was telling me that's what was going on).

I ate all my lunch, and then went back inside to work on the PC, once my mate and I had finished, the relatives all went out to eat their lunch.

I finished backing up the pc, reformatted the hard disk, and tried restoring a ghost image I found on it. That may make things a bit quicker.. nope, after waiting for it to restore, it failed booting with a "corrupt system file or i/o error" or something, and after that, it wouldn't boot at all.

I reformatted again, and installed windows.

Some of my mate's wife's friends turned up at this point.

I put all the drivers on, got everything working. These people were nice and organised, and had all their drivers for everything together, so I didn't have to go spending hours looking around the web for them.

Once everything was back working, I tried to get the scanner working. It was dumb, it kept just adding it as a USB unknown device, and wouldn't ask for the drivers. When I tried to change them, it kept wanting to use the windows usb driver. I got rid of the inf file for it, hoping it would then use the proper inf file for the scanner, but then it complained it couldn't find any drivers. Argh.

I went and found some drivers on the web, I didn't think they were any newer though, and were more than 1.4mb, so they wouldn't fit on a floppy. I had my memory key, but it needs drivers to work on 98.

I found the drivers for the memory key, downloaded them, it took me 3 floppy disks and 2 floppy drives in the machine I was working on before I could get them loaded, and after all that, they weren't even the correct drivers for this memory key. Perhaps I should actually set the thing up to be bootable, and then I could just boot dos off it, copy files off it (or the proper driver for it), and not have to worry about this in future.

I was able to get the scanner to detect, and install at this point, but all I had done was change the floppy drive (the original one kept causing the machine to lock up), something weird is going on here.

My mate got a phone call, he had to go and pick his wife up from the train, he asked his wife's friend's husband to move his car, so he could get his out, but he just gave him his keys to take his car. He went out and was about leave.

I heard the next door neighbour start up his tank of a car (XF), which I doubted he would be able to get past my bike, even though I was parked in pretty close to the house.

I went out to ask if I was in the way "You certainly will be" was the guys response. There was no need to be like that.

I jumped on my bike, and rode it up the driveway and out on to the street to get out of his way.

Gees it was nice being able to ride so freely, not wearing my hemlet, or jacket, or gloves, or balaclava, or neck warmer.

I went out on to the street, and waited for the guy to get his tank out, so I could go back in off the street. My mate came out behind me, went a bit down the street, turned sideways for some reason, and then was trying to tell me something.

He turned around and took off. The tank came out on to the street, and then I turned around and went back down the driveway.

I parked back where I was, but it will be in the way again. I'll move it a bit later, when my mate comes back, since I don't think he will have to go out again, I'll be able to park close behind the cars or something.

As I came back down the driveway, a ball was rolling across it, there were a couple of kids from next door sticking their heads over the fence, so after I parked up, I grabbed their ball from the garden where it had rolled, and went and gave it back to them.

I went back inside to start working on the PC again.

I started moving the data from the backup drive back to the originaly disk. Really annoyingly, after copying a few hundred meg, the machine would BSOD with errors in vcache and vmem. Hmm, this seems like hardware memory errors to me.

I took me about 6 goes to move all the data back (copy some, bsod, reset, repeat). I was getting pretty fed up at this point, after spending hours working on this machine, and having nothing but issues.

I have serious doubts about this hardware.

My mate's wife and a couple of the relatives walked down to the shopping centre (where the internet cafe is) to get some groceries.

My mate called up the people, told them about all the issues we were having, asked them if they had had any (BSODs etc), and they said they had been having them, and lockups and all sorts of errors since they got it. We talked them into replacing the main parts of the machine (mobo, cpu, ram), and installing it all, pretty much for cost.

We tried to work out me getting the parts, but the place isn't open when I have a chance to get there. My mate will either go and get the parts, or get them couriered up, and I'll rebuild the PC on Tuesday night, before/after dinner.

Ok, so there's not much point working on this anymore.

My mate's wife and the relatives came back, heh, they brought a trolley with the shopping in it all the way from the shopping centre.

I went out and moved my bike, I put it close behind the cars, so the guy should be able to fit his tank back in now.

I found memtest, but the disk was stuffed. I downloaded it again, booted it up, ran it, and immediately the screen was filling with errors. Aha! I knew there was something wrong. Perhaps it's just a stuffed ram stick.

I pulled the ram out of the machine. Wow, no wonder it's having issues, it's caked in dust, there's probably current bleeding going on between the pins of the chips.

My mate pulled a 128mb stick out of one of his machines, and I put that in there. I booted up memtest again, no errors to be seen. It must be that stick.

I got an old toothbrush, and carefully cleaned the dust off the memory, and put it back in. Now it did nothing at all, the machine wouldn't even boot, just beeping.

I put the good memory back, it worked, I put the stuffed memory back, no good again. It's dead now, another keyring.

I pulled the cpu fan out, and the heatsink, they were just coated with dust, and that's why the ram ended up covered.

That's a pretty crappy design, putting the chip side of the ram facing the gaps in the heatsink, pretty much right next to it.

I cleaned it all, put it back in.

I heard the tank come back and go past the house about now.

It booted up, windows had some error, msgsrv32 or something crashed, and so the machine didn't do anything.

I rebooted it again, and it came up properly.

Whenever I tried to use ctrl+esc to bring up the start menu, explorer would crash, everytime, cool.

I fiddled around for a bit, before realising the machine was stuffed, perhaps some files had been corrupted by the stuffed memory.

I moved all the data back to the backup disk again. Windows wasn't crashing after moving a couple of hundred meg this time, so that's a good sign.

I rebooted, formatted the disk etc, it said "keeping current list of bad sectors" or something, when I formatted it. Hmm, so the disk isn't in great condition either.

I tried to reinstall using the cab files I had copied to the original disk, and moved across to the backup disk, but the setup crashed some of the way through, with a "SUWIN" error or something, and complained about bad cab files.

I copied the files off the cd again, and ran setup again, it got a lot further, did a reboot and stuff, but when it got to "updating system settings" or whatever it is, in the list of "final tasks" it goes through, the machine had a heart attack, and all sorts of errors were popping up.

I gave up at this point. It's not the memory, it must be something else having big issues, like the mobo.

I pulled the machine all apart, we moved it out to the laundry, and I started spinrite running on the disk to check it's health. Perhaps that's part of the issue, and a new mobo/cpu/ram will still be dumb because of the hard disk.

It was now about 6.15pm. So much for me popping up here, spending a couple of hours on this, and going home to do something on my own time.

I hung around for a while, they would be having dinner shortly, and they're always trying to get me to stay. On Tuesday night when I was up here, they were trying to get me to come up on Wednesday night, for dinner, but I said I didn't know what would be going on because of the funeral.

Anyway, we had dinner, there were all sorts of interesting things. I'd never eaten roast beef (or whatever it was, tasted like beef) with chopsticks before, normally I just about need a chainsaw to get through it.

The head on the fish looking at me was a bit off putting, but otherwise it was all good.

I sat around for a short while afterwards, looking in the fish tank with the boy that was there. There's a snail going around in the tank now, I asked him if he knew what is was, "nope", "what does it look like?" "a snail shell" "and why does it look like a snail shell" "because it's a snail".

My mate came over a few minutes later, and he remarked about it too. He has no idea where it came from, he didn't buy it, or put it in there, it just appeared, he noticed it on the glass about 4 days ago.

I asked if he had put any new weeds or rocks or anything in there recently, thinking perhaps it was attached to something, but too small to be noticed, but he's not put anything but food in there for days.

Where the hell could a snail just appear from? I think I'll have to google this one.

I sat and watched some tv, and I left about 8.35pm.

It was freezing outside. I put my music and all my gear on.

I took off, heading for home. My music dropped out about halfway there, flat batteries, hmm, they have gone to work and back, and come up here this morning, that's close to 4 hours playing time.

I went to my mate's (who's birthday it was) place on the way home.

His Dad answered the door, my mate was there, but asleep. It was about 9pm. I said I was just popping in on my way past, and I'd give him a call in 45 minutes or so.

I went to the supermarket, bought some coke and chocolate, and then I came home.

I put the stuff in the freezer.

I mucked around blogging, and couldn't be bothered going out again, so I didn't call my mate. I couldn't even be bothered to sit and watch a DVD, I went to bed instead, about 10.30pm.