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Development Computer Died...

n4gix

n4gix

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Last Tuesday I was in the middle of replying to a thread at AVSIM when I had to go visit nature. Upon my return, I found that the mouse cursor was frozen!

Worse, the keyboard was completely unresponsive. Uh oh, I thought. The only choice was to do a crash power down and cold reboot. Upon reboot, the bloody thing failed POST and only returned a "B4" error code in the lower right corner of the main monitor! :banghead:

Google search on my Sim Machine yielded the information that MSI bios returns a "B4" error whenever the system cannot find a USB keyboard. Three known-to-be-good keyboards in a row failed as well, pointing now to a possible failure of the on-board USB 'system' or possible bad power supply. Perhaps the +5vdc rail of the PS has died.

I carried the poor thing to Tiger Direct store in Orland Park, Illinois to seek help from their service center. Unfortunately, they aren't set up for quick examination and wanted to keep the machine for a minimum of 48 hours! Argh! :yikes:

They had one computer in the store that would make a suitable replacement, and since it was their floor (display) model, I negotiated a very nice discount on it, which was enough to offset the cost of a full three year no-nonsense 3 year extended warranty.

Now it has been two days and I'm still struggling to get my new dev computer up and into production again. It's been so long since I installed/configured most of the tools that I'm getting frustrated trying to recall all of the relevant steps, much less remember just how many 'ancilliary' programs I have to have installed and configured! :confused:
For example, today I'm trying to get Max2012 reconfigured for model exports via the P3Dv.1 SDK (so I can export for both FSX and P3D). For some reason although the ACES Tools are loading, they cannot "find" modeldef.xml file...

Fortunately, I was able to pull the C drive from the 'dead machine', put it in as a secondary drive, then copy all folders and files from the ..\DATA folder across to the new computer's main drive.

I sure miss the "good old days" when the OS wasn't "machine bound" and I could have just popped in the old C: drive and kept on driving! :rotfl:
 
Well, a month ago my cat spilled coke all over my laptop and the keyboard failed.
The laptop is a Toshiba P-850 series and my better half has a Toshiba L-something series.

It was as simple as taking swapping drives in the meantime until the new keyboard arrived.

Can also tell you I swapped the WLAN card so I did not have to install the drives onto her laptop.
Did I mention I forgot to put it back in mine when the keyboard arrived and pulling my hear because it would not work.... :D
 
Aaaahh! The days of DOS even before the days before "Are you sure (Y/N)? was added. Meaning you could delete the root in one simple key stroke!
Or even better, a totally blank black screen with "Enter input: ". I've never found out what input was needed!
 
Did any of you folks ever have someone ask you "Where is the 'any' key?"
 
n4gix said:
I sure miss the "good old days" when the OS wasn't "machine bound" and I could have just popped in the old C: drive and kept on driving! :rotfl:
Click to expand...
you can, just google (moving win7 to another computer) sometimes it wont work and you have to ring the free m/soft re register service but its 99% painless. The worse that can happen is the recorded message will refer you to their call center...9 out of 10 times they will reissue a code
 
Bill

I am sorry for your loss. That's really frustrating and I'm sure that has happened to us all; luckily, the hard drive remained intact and all "precious cargo" on board!

Greetings,
Sergio
:wave:
 
Sorry Bill. Thats horrible news. I went through this a few months ago and had the worst nightmare of my life with Win8 constantly crashing because the Asus didnt like the new 500 gig SSD. I had to take it all back and I was actually able to save the old Alienware.

What a nightmare.

You will be loading software a month from now, little programs you rarely use and you had almost forgotten about.

I wish there was a full proof backup system where like once a month, you can copy off the entire HD to some other drive (during the night when you are sleeping) and have everything 'totally' backed up so you could actually go to a new drive and load it on that and it would work in a new computer.



Bill
 
I've never been able to find the "any" key on my keyboards, USB or PS/2. I do keep a PS/2 keyboard plugged into my rig in case the children spill stuff or drop the dog on my wireless one.
We all discover weaknesses on our systems after problems occur rather than before, drat them!
 
Some months ago I did a mini upgrade. A totally new PC but with the same version of Windows. It still took two weeks before it became stable without having frequent blue screens. The cause? A conflict on the motherboard between two programmes. One that automatically adjusted fan speeds and one that sensed the fan was off. So I killed the "off" and breathed a sigh of relief!
 
Sounds like the MOBO USB controller went. Sometimes they have different chips for different sets of USB inputs. Did you try all of them?

I would have just bought another MOBO, unless you were looking for an upgrade.

When I built this PC with Windows 8.1 it was a nightmare (despite being an upgrade from a E6400 to a i5 4670k!). Nothing worked. FSX crashed every 3 minutes, GMAX would hardly save a file. And it took ages to figure out how to install the SDK and get that all working again. Now it's rock stable for some reason!

Still, makes me hesitant to ever try a reformat.
 
Au-MaV said:
you can, just google (moving win7 to another computer) sometimes it wont work and you have to ring the free m/soft re register service but its 99% painless. The worse that can happen is the recorded message will refer you to their call center...9 out of 10 times they will reissue a code
Click to expand...
Unfortunately, not being able to run sysprep on the main hard drive because the host computer cannot boot at all makes this solution a non-starter in this case... :(

It's a real shame since everything on my dead dev machine was finely-tuned and well set up for quick and easy production of gauges, 3d mesh, graphics artwork and project installers...

...but remain just out of reach due to all of the now missing Registry entries. :banghead:

The only "Good News" such as there is and what there is of it is that no data was lost. The only immediate effect has been the loss of the ability to use that data, and the "production time" lost!
 
Shaun said:
Sounds like the MOBO USB controller went. Sometimes they have different chips for different sets of USB inputs. Did you try all of them?
Click to expand...
Yes, I tried all of the USB ports. I'm planning to carry the dead machine back to Tiger Direct for repairs. By leaving "its" main hard drive intact, I should be able to simply resume working with it. Then I can take the "new machine" and use the sysprep transfer procedure to migrate my flight sim machine's hard drive to the new one. The new machine will be a huge upgrade anyway being an I7 3770 3.4 GHz versus the current i7 2600 3.4 GHz processor!

The very first thing I did with the new machine was to "downgrade" it from Win8 to Win7. This procedure required 3 DVD's of OEM software and about four hours to complete! :yikes:
 
hairyspin said:
Oh, you Luddite! :duck: :rotfl: LOL
Click to expand...
I simply will not handicap myself by using any form of "Windows Phone" operating system on a production computer, much less open myself up for the headaches trying to get FSX and P3D running without "issues." :wave:
 
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