. : : Marc Sez : : .

Computer Back Online… Still No USB

My computer didn’t power up yesterday so I thought the SMPS or the motherboard might have failed. (Who has this annoying habit of calling a motherboard ‘mobo’. George isn’t it?)

I took it to ‘PC Connexions’ (or however it’s spelt) who was the guy who assembled my PC. Adithya’s too, in fact. Now this guy, Sahu, is never at his shop but his assistant is. I got my PC all cleaned out with a brush and when it was nice and shiny clean he powered it on and it worked fine. Just great. And after connecting a USB hub (is that what it’s called?) to a USB port on my computer and after removing it, my USB functionality was also fully restored! What the heck?

So I brought the damn thing back and it refused to power on here. I went to Adithya’s house, made him stop playing WoW and turned off his computer and returned with his power cable. Sure enough, it was the power cable that was causing the problem. I returned it and got a new one from Mercy Electronics for Rs. 30. (Now Ragha will comment and say he could have gotten the cable for cheaper.)

Finally the computer was back online but there was no display on the monitor. This was a common problem. After a bit of shaking and tapping the graphics card the display was restored.

Now after all this, USB devices are still not recognised on my computer. Annoying. It works fine in Ubuntu but not in XP. (And I’ve already reinstalled XP twice so don’t you even dare suggest that. See previous posts.)

Today I noticed that I hadn’t installed any program to handle .rar files. I don’t like WinRAR. I usually use PowerArchiver which looks more modern. So I found the files on the net. But guess what? The installation files were inside a RAR archive. Freakin’ brilliant.

Going to borrow that USB hub thing from the shop. Will post photos if successful.