Save Me
02 October 2007
I've had a rather disastrous 24 hours. It all started at 2:00 AM on Monday morning. After logging out of Final Fantasy XI for the night, I decided to watch some Bleach on Veoh before bed. For some reason though, whenever I tried to play the video, there would be no audio. Odd, I thought, perhaps it's something wrong with the website? I took a look at my installed hardware and the sound card appeared to be working correctly. However, when I went to the sound set up menu it refused to recognise it was even there. Stupid thing, I thought, there must be a loose connection somewhere, I'll open the laptop up and take a look... bad idea. This laptop case is the most retarded thing I've ever seen. Firstly, in order to get to five of the screws you have to dismantle the monitor. Once that's done, you've got to unscrew a billion other screws to get into the case. Even then, there are three very crucial screws that for some ungodly reason, are attached to the case and cannot be reached. I got so frustrated I just forced the bloody case until it broke away. The damage wasn't too major, nothing you'd notice without taking a really close look. Anyway, with the case off I could take a look at the motherboard and installed components. There was five years worth of dust inside the machine so I had to get rid of that first. Actually it looked more like soot, very odd. After cleaning it up I had a quick look around and couldn't see any loose connections or anything. I didn't want to unscrew the motherboard in case I broke it so I gave up and put everything back together. Put the final screws back in and tried to start it up. But, damn, the monitor doesn't work now. I dismantle it and recheck the wiring about 5-6 times but no luck. It was 7:00 AM by this point so I decided to give up and go to bed. I was sure I'd need to buy a new computer at this point.
Woke up in the afternoon and tried again to fix my laptop. It was all or nothing this time. I took the monitor off, detached the main case and set about removing the motherboard. Did I mention this case was retarded in its design? Well, I'm going to mention it again. The heat sink was trapped by a bit of plastic with no discernible way to get it out. Sod that, I've not got time to waste. I took out a pair of pliers and ripped the obstructing piece of plastic away, thus freeing the motherboard. Another ton of soot/dust on the underside which I had to clean up. Then I noticed a connector that I'd not disconnected when removing the motherboard. Could this be the elusive wire that makes the monitor work? Took me awhile to re-attach all the wiring and fit everything back into the case. Put the monitor back on, plugged in the power supply, and prayed. Pushed the power button and... WE HAVE VISION!! It works! Hallelujah! I was so relieved. Overjoyed, I logged in and was expecting everything to be all right again. Except it wasn't... damn. There was still no sound. I checked the Internet for solutions and found something about running services.msc. I did that and found the bit that handled all the audio on the computer: Windows Audio. Guess what? Damn thing was turned off!! I didn't do that, who the crap turned it off?! I restarted it and started and episode of Hanazakari No Kimi-tachi E to test it. You can't imagine the pure ecstasy I felt when the sound of the title sequence flowed out from the speakers. It was pure heaven. The sense of relief was immense. I never, ever want to go through that turmoil again. I wasted all that time trying to fix a hardware problem when it was a simple case of a software setting... GODDAMN YOU!!!
Posted byHocchan at 5:04 pm
