[T3] Goin' to hell in a handcart!

[Jim Adney]

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
*******************************