Well i thought i would write about my graphics card saga on my computer. On Saturday i went to move the mouse on my PC to wake it up to check my messages and nothing came up on screen. I thought the PC had simply crashed. So i rebooted the PC and nothing came up on screen. This was a little worrying. I went through the usual diagnostics of removing all onboard cards and stuff and narrowed the problem down to my PCI-E graphics card. This card was fairly new and i bought it on eBay over a year ago. I managed to plug the LCD screen to the onboard graphics card and i was surprised to see that was also damaged. The screen was jumping all over the place and their were tons of lines all over the place. I knew this wasn’t at all good. I looked closely at the motherboard to find there was 1 tiny 6.3v 1000Uf capacitor that had blown. Basically the top of the capacitor was rounded and should be nice and flat. This wasn’t the most ideal of things to find on a computer. I took the motherboard out of the chassis and placed it down. I fetched my soldering equipment and looked through my stock of spare capacitors and found i had an exact match which was great. I set about removing the old capacitor and replacing it with the new one. After about 5 minutes repairing it i hooked it back up and powered it back on and success it was working. I also tried the PCI-E card but alas this wasn’t working still which is pretty annoying. After further inspection i believe the graphics card was made of sub-standard quality as the solder points were oxidised and had turned slight green. This is sure sign of shoddy workmanship when it comes to soldering. There could be many reasons for it from acid from fingers touching the soldering points before they were soldered to substandard working practices.
After checking all the BIOS and making sure things were still working normally, i put the motherboard back into the chassis and powered it all up and success the onboard graphics were once again working – but sadly only to a point. Once windows booted up it decided it wanted to repeatedly reboot itself – i eventually narrows that down to the drivers that were installed. I removed the drivers for the ATI card and also the onboard card because for some reason it doesn’t like its own drivers. The system is now thankfully fully working again but with the windows inbuilt graphics driver – which is not too bad – it still runs at 32bit at 1024×768 without any problems.
The idea of just repairing the motherboard instead of throwing it out and getting a new one is the fact i have no money to do that and i have to basically use what i can to fix problems at this current time. If it does go again though i will have to save about £100 for a new computer as i still need one even though I use my laptop daily.
Well that is my little Graphics card saga 
For anyone who like to chat on facebook there are alternative methods to use the chat facilities. I don’t like using the online chat interface, i find it very slow and it seems to pause as your typing. It can be very frustrating. I have found there are other ways to connect to this interface using Miranda IM – with Miranda IM you can also connect to all your other favourite chat providers such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and many many others. Miranda IM is a free and VERY small program that is highly customizable and you can do pretty much what you like with it. I have my Miranda IM set up to deliver contact updates too – which means whenever someone on facebook posts a new status it automatically pops up on screen. Its a really nice and easy way to chat to people and you don’t need to be on the facebook page to use it.
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