No at least I doubt it because nothing ever zapped me even the slightest bit
when I worked in the computer and I grounded myself. (I was a bad, bad boy,
so I was grounded!
) Actually, I'll tell you the order in which it
happened.
Brought my computer out of standby, and my hard drive started making funny
grinding noises and it kept sounding like it was turning off and on. (The
normal power on/off clunk noises you hear from a Western Digital hard drive
when you turn it on and off.) I backed up my data immediately and shut down
my computer. I turned it back on a half hour later. Everything worked
fine, then a half hour later (while playing music on WMP10 from my other
hard drive) the computer froze up, the music stopped, and the grindy, clunky
noises returned again. Shut it down, turned it back on, and the motherboard
no longer detected that hard drive. (Although that hard drive did turn on.)
It wouldn't detect my other hard drive either until I disconnected the bad
drive, then it would. If I tried just connecting the bad hard drive, it
still wouldn't detect it, so that's how I know that drive's bad. That
night, I installed a new heatsink/CPU fan on my Athlon XP 2400+, powered it
up, and my motherboard started doing beeps through the speaker as if the
memory weren't detected, even though both modules were installed properly.
I tried moving the memory modules around and removing each one, and no
matter which way I did it, it still failed. I then bought an Asus K8N and a
new AMD Sempron 64 2800+. (I wanted an Athlon 64, but I didn't want to
spend much money.) Even though most people told me I wouldn't notice a
difference, I have, especially in WMP10's visualizations. I can run them at
much larger sizes without a reduction in speed. My memory is PC-2700, (One
stick is PC-2700 and the other is PC-3000 which does exist for those of you
thinking I made a typo.) but even so, my motherboard has only recognized
them as 133MHz, which would be PC-2100. Oh well, I'm getting PC-3200 RAM
eventually anyway to replace the 2700 RAM. I tried overclocking the FSB to
155 (not quite 166) and the visualizations could go even larger in WMP10,
but the computer crashed, so I just went ahead and dropped it back down to
normal levels and I'm just going to leave it alone. Then, not even a week
later, I was running a graphics visualization in WMP10 (the actual WMP10
Energy Bliss visualization) and it began to artifact and I turned my head
from the screen for a second and looked back, and the entire screen went
very blurry. Oh well, I hated that FX5600 anyway because it came
underclocked. (I got ripped off at ebay.) Now I have an ATI x1600 PRO
256MB GDDR2 AGP 8x video card on the way from a much more reliable source,
newegg.com, but I just hope that my 400-watt power supply can handle it
since it's not an Antec, Thermaltake, or Enermax. As for my hard drive, I'm
getting the 80GB hard drive from my mom's computer in a week because she's
going to get a new computer for her birthday that I built for her. (The
computer with the 3800+ x2.) My old hard drive was basically an identical
hard drive except her 80GB hard drive is newer. (It's still a Western
Digital 80GB 7200RPM 2MB cache IDE hard drive.) I could get SATA thanks to
my new motherboard, but I don't want to spend the money for a slight boost
in hard drive performance. (Fully aware that the HD is the slowest part of
a computer.) Oh, and then when I went to adjust my monitor's brightness up
yesterday, when I pressed the up button, my monitor got considerably darker
instead, and now even at 100% it's not very bright, so I have to use my
video card's color adjuster to compensate.) Well, I guess these things
happen to a nearly 4-year-old computer, but you wouldn't think all of these
things would happen at once, as well as this high of a volume of problems.
By the way, the new heatsink and CPU fan was mounted properly to the Athlon
XP 2400+ with the proper usage of thermal paste. I used that new
heatsink/CPU fan for my Sempron 64 since it's compatible with any modern
AMD, (it's a $40 Zalman cooler) and things are going fine SO FAR. The CPU's
running in the upper 20's to low 30's celcius.
