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The power supply device of my DS2 PC collapsed (rather: exploded - all lights went off).
The old Pc (intel celeron 400?, 196mb ram, Firefox 1.0) i'm using now has no keyboard anymore, pretty painful to 'type' with the mouse only via this auxiliary Windows tool...

I'll keep you up to date (much) later.

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Hope you get your computers up and running again. Take care and I for one will wait for your return.

Elf

Sorry to hear your misfortune. Hope you didn't have any important work stored on the pc as it sounds like a total loss.

ouf u got what i call a hand grenade power supply: a catastrophic failure of a psu. really hope the psu didnt destroy all the other pc components (cpu, gpu, ram and mobo) as well since exploding psus have a tendency to do that.

will be pretty hard to find a replacement psu for a pentium 2 era pc since the voltage rails for modern psus are configured differently from the ones from the pentium 2 era. i shall pray to azunai (almost said akatosh and trolled this site with skyrim stuff LOLZ! :mrgreen: ) for the deliverance of your old pc.

Hoping you can get things back up and running soon KillerGremal. I feel your pain.

sad indeed, I lost a motherboard a few years ago had about same symptoms u described. hopely it is just a psu, as they are simple to replace. guess there is no recycled computers in your country for parts? they pretty much give em away here.

Thanks for your wishes, and I hardly can believe it myself, it's working again! Smile

 
Whew, were some frightening moments though. Inside the old power supply unit I've found a burnt cutout labeled with '10A 250V' - not sure how fast it reacts but this limit seems to be quite high for computer components...!? :o
But ok, let's assume the PSU manufacturer knew what he did. At least the price would imply this - the old PSU was 2-3x more expansive than the new one...

Frightening also was the 'no bootable disk found' message - one moment I really thought it had toasted all 4 hard disks... :jawdrop:
However simply resetting the Bios/CMOS helped here, even if it took an hour to find this approach. And honestly this procedure leaves a doubtful aftertaste what really happened with the motherboard, nonetheless I'm glad that all hard disks are still working (so far).
Also PCI cards and onboard components still seems to be functional, however time will show if this impression is correct.

However I have to rethink my 'backup philosophy' once again - not that I had none, but it's too lazy (or I am) and too insufficient capacity-wise. For example I had no backup from the last week incl. the long weekend... :o
And also a little backup note would be good to remember which BIOS setting you have entered the last time (CPU/bus multipliers, hyper-threading/memory stuff, etc.). Hopefully I didn't enter any mess here. :P

 

Edit:
In meantime it seems the graphic card suffers now some kind of hickup. While/after intense scrolling in text files or while alt+tab'ing the screen sometimes freezes for several seconds, and using the keyboard then may cause the PC tower to produce a generic 'beeep'... Sad
However the card was already >5 years old, so almost any low budget card should be sufficient replacement.

For the price of a new Nvidia GT 610 card i've got now two old Geforce 8600 and 9600 GT cards.
I've thought this was be a good deal, specially regarding on the 9600, but its power consumption is rather high for my taste and so its temperature is - at least in my air-cooled PC... Puzzled

So right now the 8600 looks some more reasonable to me. On average 30-60 fps on 1280x1024 with DS2. During the warm summer season I guess I have to live with it.

Getting some drivers however for Windows 2000+XP was rather painful in both cases... Sad

i didnt realise a pentium 2 era pc board had pci-express slots for use with a 8600gt and 9600gt which are pci-express cards. am i missing something here?

btw, its a better buy with the 8600gt and 9600gt. why? cuz they are both faster than the gt610 which is actually an ultra budget low-end card for htpc use. the gt610 wud prolly lag horribly if u tried it for gaming.

Lady Femme wrote:
i didnt realise a pentium 2 era pc board had pci-express slots for use with a 8600gt and 9600gt which are pci-express cards. am i missing something here?
. . .
Maybe Wink - while my DS2 PC (with an Ahtlon XP) was broken I temporarily used an even older PC (one with a Celeron or Pentium) to go online to order a new PSU.

 

Lady Femme wrote:
. . .
btw, its a better buy with the 8600gt and 9600gt. why? cuz they are both faster than the gt610 which is actually an ultra budget low-end card for htpc use. the gt610 wud prolly lag horribly if u tried it for gaming.
To replace my former graphic card (harmed anyhow too) I also intended to buy a GT 610/620/630 (or any AMD/ATi 65xx) card for my DS2 PC, unsure however if there still will be drivers for Windows 2000 and XP.

And indeed, GT 610 isn't any good for gaming, and I have been told that a GT 640 or an AMD/ATi 7750 would be needed on minimum to compete with a 9600 GT from graphical/rendering point of view - ignoring however the heat/noise emissions.

lol u judge the mid-high end video cards too harshly. once u try them and realise how powerful they are, they can become addictive and u start to forget and forgive the heat and noise emissions.

btw, the heat and noise problem is the fault of the video card manufacturer for not being skilful enuff to come up with a better and quieter heatsink and fan solution. for example, if u look at arctic cooling's range of video card coolers, they are both silent and cool very well. therefore, the heat and noise problem is not the fault of the video card being "high-end".

for comparison, the 9600gt is around 2.5 times faster than the 8600gt and over 4 times faster than the gt610.

being able to play with good graphic detail settings helps with the immersion factor when gaming. seeing pixelated textures and blocky object models is just a turn off when gaming.

also, i dont recommend u buy the newer cards if u just play ds2 on that ds2 machine as the system details.gas file can be a nightmare to update with the newer cards.

however, i do not know what u are talking about lack of drivers for win2k and winxp unless u require some custom drivers... or u are talking about further graphic driver updates.

if u just play ds2 on that pc, u do NOT need to keep updating your drivers. the ds series of games are NOT stressful on the gpu so updating the drivers for better performance is a moot point. i do not know where u read or who started that nonsense about keeping video card drivers up to date for playing old games/software. just read the warning i posted about the latest 320.18 forceware drivers killing cards.

ngohq has got a huge collection of drivers from both nvidia and ati/amd and even some lesser known video card makers as well as dinosaur drivers for conventional pci and agp cards. so if u ever have to reformat your pc, u know where to look to find that fav old driver that u like...

@Lady Femme: Some good arguments, however they get smelted by a room temperature of almost 28°C (at ~midnight) and then washed away by boiling floods of acid sweat. :P / Sad

 
Thanks for the driver link by the way. The driver version I use currently is 175.16. I was happy that I've found it so I didn't want to update it so far. It seems it was intended as XP driver package, but its content is accepted by Windows 2000 too. Smile

well the temps here at my place are even hotter than urs! it can be as hot as 34°C here and i do not have problems with my video cards which dissipate over 150w of heat overheating. u must have a cramped and tight casing and lack case fans too... :P

@Lady Femme: If my old PC is still good in something then it's for having fans. :P
Beside of the PSU there is a front and a rear fan, and each of the two HD boxes has its extra fan. They all have a diameter of 8cm and run at 5V, so they are not really loud (a 4cm high-speed fan alone would be louder I think).

Howewer these fans 'just' take the heat away from the graphic card and bring it to me - so as long we share one room the dimension of cooling system has finally no real impact on the room temperature (unless there are some isolated heat pipes leaving the room).
Zher is so much concentrated heat energie in a PC - it's a shame that it isn't used/transformed for some thing more useful... Sad

There really should be a PC with integreated Stirling engine or so...
                 Stirling engine

If I ever will find my former (custom) memory settings again, I swear I will take a picture of it!
...well, assumed memory modules and memory controller are still ok. :o

eeks... those are some nasty graphical artifacts there, killer gremal.

i think your memory modules and northbridge memory control hub (MCH) shud be ok as ds will beotch about it very fast if your ram is unstable in anyway. u shud be getting lots of exception detected errors if your ram or mch is spoilt in any way.

thought u got a new video card? is that screenshot with artifacts from your old spoilt video card?

also, if u are using a recent motherboard from 2007-ish, it shud have a save/load bios settings function using the f11 or f12 keys or a function to export bios settings to hard drive, usb drive or cd/dvd drive.