[T3] Goin' to hell in a handcart!

[William Sills]

We had an electrical surge in the house on the 13th. Apparently the wires coming from the pole shorted, so one phase went dead, and the other got 220+ on it. How did people live without electricity and central heat in the past?  Just got the desktop working again today!  -Bill

Sent from my iPhone

On Dec 31, 2012, at 3:57 PM, "Jim Adney" <jadney at vwtype3.org> wrote:

> We've had a few weeks of electronics nightmare in our house. It's 
> like everything decided to break at the same time.
> 
> To start with, the wireless part of our wireless router has been 
> flakey for a few years. I have to restart it a couple times a week to 
> get it to communicate wirelessly again. My computer has a direct 
> connection to it, but everything else here (Melissa's desktop, our 
> laptops) connects by wifi.
> 
> Restarting the router didn't seem like much of a problem until about 
> 2 weeks ago. Then things went into rapid failure mode.
> 
> First, my desktop started to lock up. Never saw that happen before, 
> but it happened twice and then suddenly it wouldn't boot past the 
> Windows welcome screen. Memory and hard drives checked out fine.
> 
> Opened up my PC and found a row of capacitors with their rupture 
> disks open and beige crud on top. Faulty capacitors, only lasted 
> about 8 years. I hear that's been a problem with the Dell GX270s.
> 
> Went back to the UW surplus place where I picked up these PCs a 
> couple years ago, and they gave me a skeleton GX280 (no hard drives) 
> for $10. Good deal, except now I need some new, faster memory (old 
> memory is DDR, new is DDR2) and the new power supply expects SATA 
> drives and mine are all ATA.
> 
> Parts got ordered just before Christmas, just in time to catch the 
> worst of the Christmas mail glut....  
> 
> Then the wireless stopped working. Ran a temp hard line to Melissa's 
> PC which worked for a day, then that stopped. So I eliminated the 
> router and ran the temp line directly out of the ATT/Siemens 
> SpeedStream DSL modem. That worked for awhile, then it didn't. Then 
> it would stop for 8-24 hours at a time. Not sure where the problem 
> was. The flashing lights on the DSL modem sometimes flashed in the 
> correct way, and sometimes went bonkers.  
> 
> We have an internet connection now, but I never know how long it will 
> last. I tried to call ATT yesterday and immediately got a recorded 
> message saying that they had a widespread DSL problem that they were 
> working on. A google search reveals that ATT has been having DSL 
> outage troubles in various places for months.
> 
> Marion, does your wife know anything about this? Not looking for 
> anyone to blame, just curious about the nature of the problem.
> 
> So, I've been slow to respond to some of the Type 3 questions here. 
> Now you know why.
> 
> My first package of upgrade PC parts arrived, containing the very 
> least important parts that I ordered. I figure the rest will arrive 
> on Wednesday, and I should be back on line by next weekend, assuming 
> ATT gets their stuff fixed by then.
> 
> Once I get that done, I have my grandfather's Grandfather clock to 
> fix, and my '73 Zenith TV to do some minor work on. Then there is the 
> newish LG flat screen TV that my parents were about to throw away....
> 
> I enjoy fixing things, but this is NUTS!
> 
> It's a really, REALLY good thing that I'm "retired!"    ;-)
> 
> -- 
> *******************************
> Jim Adney, jadney at vwtype3.org
> Madison, Wisconsin, USA
> *******************************
> 
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