John Lamansky

Tonight my computer froze. Windows itself was locked up. That, like, almost never happens.

But even more unusually, after several seconds of being locked up, suddenly a shrill tone came out of my Dell Dimension 8400 computer tower. It sounded like a prolonged BIOS beep. I turned off the computer right away. And then decided to turn it back on to see if it would boot successfully.

It booted up just fine, thankfully. I did some online research and I found an article that said the following:

Executives at Creative Technology Ltd. said they believe they’ve isolated the so-called “squeal of death” associated with the company’s Audigy sound cards, and that it’s not tied to the sound card itself.

The “squeal,” which consists of a shrill tone caused by an audio loopback after a PC locks up, has been tied to a specific PCI bridge chip used in at least one motherboard from Soyo Computer Inc. The same squeal has also been tied to a PCI glitch in PCs manufactured by Dell Computer Corp., according to Steve Erickson, vice-president of audio development at Creative Labs, Fremont, Calif.

[...]

Creative has worked to track down the source of the squeal. In one of the cases, Creative found the glitch was tied to the AT123S PCI arbitration chip from Attansic Technology Corp., often used to avoid system conflicts in motherboards with a large number of PCI devices. Under high bus loads, the chip locks up the sound, causing the squeal, Erickson said. The chip has been found on the Soyo SY-K7V Dragon Plus motherboard, which uses the Via KT266A chipset.

Hmm, that “under high bus loads, the chip locks up the sound, causing the squeal” sounds about right, considering I was “only” exporting an audio file, editing another, and opening Outlook 2003 at the same time, with a bunch of other programs open. Tsk tsk.

One thing though: it sounded like the tone was coming from inside the computer. The article didn’t say whether this squeal came through the speakers or whether it was internal, so unfortunately I don’t know for sure whether this is the problem.

But next time, I’ll think twice before I bog down my computer to that extent!

If there is one place in our house that has the largest civilization of dust bunnies, it would have to be the insides of our computers.

So in anticipation of the “computer spring cleaning that’s not during spring” that my dad and I were going to do this week, my mom had purchased some “compressed air.” However, after finding that it wasn’t “compressed air” but rather a “compressed chemical concoction,” we returned it to Wal-Mart and decided that we would use my dad’s air compressor.

I got everything unplugged from the backs of the computers; my dad got the air compressor ready. I cleaned the dust caked on the back ports and opened the computers. My dad turned on the air compressor and blasted the air in there.

I wasn’t too sure… that air looked powerful enough to really damage something. This wasn’t air coming from a little can of compressed air; this was air coming from the big thing that you use to blow up tires.

The air compressor cleaned it out really good though. As I look out our porch window I still see the exiled dust bunnies on our porch, looking dejected and fluffless.

Anyway, I repluggified the computers, turned them on, and made sure that they booted up okay. Everything looked okey-dokey-dandy, so I went on to do some other non-computer things.

I came back to my computer after some time and noticed the HDD Health alerts on my desktop: hard drive over critical temperature. Uh-oh.

Continue Reading »

Yesterday morning I plugged in my computer. I reached for the power button on my Dell Dimension 8400, but then noticed that the tower’s power light was flashing orange. Hmm, deja vu.

Thankfully, after the last incident with orange lights I had decided to keep my Dell manual right next to my tower. I found the section about power light signals and read:

If the power light is blinking amber - The computer is receiving electrical power, but an internal power problem might exist.

Ensure that the voltage selection switch is set to match the AC power at your location (if applicable).

Ensure that the processor power cable is securely connected to the system board (see page 73).

Well, I was sure that the voltage selection switch was in the right place. And I found it highly unlikely that the processor power cable would suddenly unseat itself. Ugh.

Then I had an idea. I flipped off the surge protector and then flipped it back on.

Tada! No more orange lights. Weird.

The moral of the story: try the simple stuff first.

(Whew, for a moment there I thought there would be The Mystery of the Orange Light Part 4!)

[Note: This recollection of events is part 3 of a series, so to get the complete story, you'll probably want to read part 1 and part 2 first.]

Finally, the technician was here! We recognized the technician from before, when he had come to replace a dead hard drive in the same computer.

Right away, he asked me what the problem was. After I told him, he said he was sure it was the power supply. It just couldn’t be the motherboard. When I told him about how the fans were still running, he said the fans could run even with a bad power supply. I was half amused, half upset, that the problem was the power supply.

After I completed my normal routine of unplugging everything from the back of the computer for the technician, the technician opened the computer and began to rip the parts out of the motherboard at amazing speed. I was in shock, considering how I had spent nearly half an hour about a week ago trying to delicately take a RAM module out of the socket.

As he was replacing the motherboard, my mom asked him whether he advised buying a warranty extension, since the expiration date for this computer’s warranty was days away. Much to our surprise, the technician answered that even he bought extended Dell warranties.

This seemed rather strange. If something went wrong with the technician’s computers, he would be the one repairing them anyway! It turns out he gets a warranty for the parts, not the service. Dell has some proprietary parts in their computers (I, personally, wouldn’t be surprised if they do that on purpose) that are almost impossible to get from anyone but Dell.

I also mentioned that the service representative with whom I had chatted previously had said that the lack of POST beeps must be caused by a loose connection. But the technician disputed that hypothesis by pointing out that the internal speaker was built directly into the motherboard.

After the technician finished installing the new motherboard, he closed the computer and turned it upright. Clang! We heard something fall. The technician put the computer on its side again, opened it up, found the fallen screw, and rescrewed that screw.

He turned on the computer, and the orange light was gone! The computer booted up! (Oh, so it wasn’t the power supply…) Still no POST beeps. Oh well.

The technician entered BIOS setup, set the time, and changed other settings based on my computer’s hardware configuration. He then inserted a CD into the drive and restarted the computer. The CD gave him access to a command prompt, which he used to access a program on the CD. Using the program he then typed in the Service Tag for my Dell computer. And then the program actually changed the stored Service Tag in the motherboard’s memory. Oooohhh…

Then… it was all done! Or so we thought. After a restart, instead of the computer booting into Windows, we were met with a “Blue Screen of Death.” Of course, in the Windows XP-era, a blue screen either means a bad driver, or it means something is seriously wrong… unlike older Windows version where blue screens happen quite frequently.

And then something else surprising happened: the technician had to call Dell technical support to find the answer to the problem.

It turned out that the blue screen was caused by an incorrect hard drive setting in the BIOS. The technician changed that and — whala! — Windows XP booted up just fine. The mystery of the orange light was solved!

Or, again, so we thought. The technician packed up his things and went out the door. I sat down at my computer, clicked on my user account, and began to type in my password. Nothing happened.

I ran out the door after the technician. He came back in and tried to use the keyboard. Nothing. The technician then restarted the computer. And tada! it worked. And this time the technician was able to actually leave.

A few days later…

Okay, I was panicking. I had a BIOS error that said there had been a fan failure! I quickly turned off the computer. I went online and all Dell Chat representatives were busy. Okay, so I called instead. This time I was determined that I would not let them call me “ma’am.” When the representative asked for my name, I said very slowly and with diction, “John Lamansky.”

The representative stammered something like, “Is it… alright if I call you by that name?” I was taken aback by this question, and stammered in return something similar to, “Yes… it’s fine… I mean, please do… call me… that.”

While we continued our conversation, the representative actually seemed to be soothing me by repeatedly saying, “Don’t worry, I’ll send a technician to take a look at it.” And he actually said, much to my amusement, and with much soothingness, “Don’t think about it anymore.” (”Now remember you Dell technicians in India, those Americans are really attached to their computers”)

The last part of our conversation seemed to take forever, because the representative would not stop repeating how everything was going to turn out okay. I was growing very impatient. (”I’ll be okay if you let me hang up!!”)

The same technician came back again. He just couldn’t believe that he had to come back to service the same computer. He guessed that the fan wasn’t spinning up quickly enough at boot-up, which is why I received the error. He did a few tweaks and left. That must’ve done it, because thankfully I haven’t received the fan error again.

The Mystery of the Orange Light:
Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

Our family was at the house of another homeschooling family, the parents of which were named Gail and Joe, for a New Year’s Eve party. At about 9:30 P.M., I asked Gail if I could try out a program, which I had made, on their computer, and have their kids and some of the other kids there test it out.

She said yes, so I went to the computer, plugged in my portable USB flash drive, and copied the program onto the hard drive. I had actually run the program on the computer before, but it didn’t work because the computer had 24-bit graphics instead of 32-bit, which was what I had set the program to require. I had since fixed the problem, so I double-clicked on the program, and this time it ran.

It showed the splash screen, and was about to move to the next phase of the program when suddenly the screen went black. The “hp” logo appeared. Uh-oh… I knew that the computer had restarted.

Hmm, it must’ve been a driver problem with either the USB flash drive or DirectX. But that didn’t make any sense because I had used/run both the USB flash drive and the game on the computer previously (except, as mentioned before, the program didn’t work).

As Windows XP booted, I was planning to use System Restore to revert to an automatic restore point from earlier that day. The Windows XP boot screen disappeared. Normally the Welcome Screen would appear, but instead, I was met with a blank screen and a lot of hard drive access noises coming from the computer.

I held down on the power button. The computer turned off. I then removed the USB flash drive from the USB port and started the computer up again. The “Windows did not start properly last time” message appeared. I selected the “Start Windows Normally” option. The same thing happened.

I turned off and turned on the computer. This time, I selected “Last Known Good Configuration” from the menu. The same black screen.

I tried again, but this time selecting “Safe Mode.” As usual, the screen then displayed the name of each driver or system file as it was loading. But then it stopped on a file called MUP.sys. And I got the same hard drive access noises.

Great. If not even Safe Mode would work, then something was seriously wrong.

After Gail and Joe found the Windows XP CD-ROM, I inserted it into the top drive, which was a CD-RW drive. It was a little before 10:00 P.M.

I restarted the computer, but I wasn’t even asked if I wanted to boot from the CD. Since there were two drives, Joe asked if I was sure I had it in the right drive. I said I was sure, since the top drive, as far as I knew, was always the master drive.

I also noted that the light on the CD-RW drive was orange instead of green. Hmm, that sounds a little too familiar.

I decided I would need to go into the BIOS to change the boot order. I restarted, and repeatedly pressed F2, which is the BIOS setup key on my computer. That didn’t work. I repeatedly alternated between pressing F2 and the Delete key. None of them worked.

I asked Joe if he could look for the computer’s manual. Since the BIOS had finished loading before I had time to try anything other keys, I had to restart the computer again. Just as Joe found the manual, I pressed F1 and — tada! — “Entering Setup…”

Oh boy. The CD drive was set to load before the hard drive. That meant something must be wrong with the drive, as evidenced by the orange light and the fact that it would not boot from the Windows XP CD.

I was about to open the computer when it dawned on me. In the BIOS, it said the CD-ROM drive was set to boot before the hard drive, not a CD-RW! Oops. It was the bottom drive.

Hooray! The XP CD booted. I went through the screens until I came to the option to repair an existing Windows XP installation.

As Windows Setup repaired Windows, Mark (who was back from college for Christmas break) and I were pondering as to what could have happened. It couldn’t be something with DirectX, as that worked fine with other games. It couldn’t be my USB flash drive, as I had used it before on this computer.

We thought it had to be my game. But, naturally, I didn’t program any such destructive action into it. Was it a bug in the language I used to create it? Did a virus latch onto it? The bug theory didn’t make sense, since I had run the game on other computers before. The virus theory didn’t make sense, since my computer and their computer both had updated antivirus software.

Today I did a Google search for “MUP.sys” (the name of the file that was last to load in Safe Mode before the computer would freeze). I found that apparantly this file can be corrupted by a virus, or it can just become randomly corrupted. I’m guessing the latter was the case.

But Mark and I came to the conclusion that it must have been a Y2K6 bug that came two hours early.

[Note: This recollection of events is part 2 of a series, so to get the complete story, you'll probably want to read part 1 first.]

What?! The account was locked?!

I couldn’t believe it. My last hope, so it seemed to me, in order to fix my busted computer was to check if there was a sliver of warranty left. I knew my computer had been purchased about a year ago, but I was really hoping that there would be some left. But I couldn’t really do anything about the red-text error message on the Dell website. My mom’s Dell account was locked because someone had entered an incorrect password 6 times. The account would be automatically unlocked in 23 hours.

I couldn’t wait that long! If I had any warranty left at all, it was almost all gone. I didn’t really think there was anything else I could do. (But now that I think about it, I suppose I could’ve called Dell instead, but due to a dislike for Dell phone support resulting from previous experience…)

Two days later…

We were gone all day Sunday, so I was able to go back to working on the computer problem on Monday. I logged into my Dell account. (Please, let there be some warranty left!) Oh, the suspense; oh, the drama… (etcetera…)

I couldn’t believe it. 5 days of warranty left. I was relieved and thrilled. I began looking for ways to contact Dell.

Let’s see… I can do a chat or I can make a phone call. I decided to choose chat, for several reasons:

1. No accent problems.
2. No more calling me “ma’am” because my voice is rather high at my current age.
3. No more holding for half an hour just to talk to someone.
4. No more keeping the phone glued to my ear as I work at the back of the computer, etc.

So I started a chat. I was connected with someone named “Pooja,” obviously a foreign name. I remembered the name by thinking, “it’s a cross between Winnie the Pooh and Jar-Jar Binks.” He had me do many things: unplug everything but the power cord, check the voltage settings, etc. Nothing worked. Then he told me to reset the PCI cards.

Bother. Removing and replacing things in the computer was what was giving me trouble before. But I had to try it. The Dell technician gave me the URL to an article on removing PCI cards. I started with the graphics card. I got one end out, but I could not get out the other end. It suddenly dawned on me that I was trying to remove a PCI Express card using instructions for PCI cards. I had to push the little green lever first, then the card would lift out!

Anyway, by the time I was finished, I was greeted with an unpleasant surprise - the Dell technician had ended the chat. At first I was indignant that they would become so impatient as to terminate our connection, but then I saw a template message saying that due to my chat inactivity for the past minute, I had one more minute to respond before I would be cut off. Oh, the frustration of it all. But it turns out that the termination of our chat was one of the luckiest things that could have happened.

I started another chat and ended up with someone named “Prabal.” Another foreign name, obviously. I told him that I had been cut off, so he asked me what steps I had been able to complete. I responded with a list and the exasperated explanation, “I am now trying to reseat the PCI cards without breaking anything…” There were a few things I overlooked when making my list of successfully completed steps, so he asked me to do them over again, and — here’s the weird, but unsurprising, thing — some of his instructions were identical to those given by the “Pooja” person. Sometimes I wonder how much of a technician chat is actually original conversation. But I later found out this guy was awesome.

After those few repeats, Prabal had me remove (not reseat, as Pooja had instructed me to do) the cards and RAM from the system. I realized that this guy knew his stuff. It was common sense, yet brilliant - if we get a different error after removing a group of components, then it has to be one of those components! I was also excited because I was getting better and better and removing the cards and RAM modules. I removed both of the RAM modules in 2 minutes, instead of the 30 or so it took me to remove one of them two days ago. The orange power light prevailed, so it wasn’t one of those items. Then Prabal had me unplug the power and data cords from the disk drives and hard drives. Still the same orange power light.

Then he had me listen for beep codes (the noises the computer makes when it first starts up). I explained to him that I have never been able to hear beep codes even when the computer is working normally. He suggested that the speaker cable was disconnected. I believed him, but I found out later in the week that that was completely untrue (to be explained in part 3).

It had to be the power supply or the motherboard. Prabal had me see if the fans were spinning. Again, he was so smart - if the fans were not spinning, then they weren’t getting power. The fans were spinning. He told me it was the motherboard and got to work on dispatching a technician.

After giving me my dispatch number, case number, etc., he asked me to press a button on the chat website to end the conversation and complete a survey. Of course, I was so elated I wanted to tell the people at Dell how wonderful this technician was (compared to the first one I got), but with my blog in mind, I wanted to copy our conversation.

I was using my mom’s computer to perform the chat. And her computer was unusual in the sense that you cannot paste something into Word if you copy the item when Word is not open. So I started Word. Oh, yeah - Word is really slow on my mom’s computer. Apparently Prabal lost patience, or else he was just following the rules of the workplace. He terminated our session just as I was able to copy our conversation. The bad thing is I wasn’t able to complete the survey since it was terminated on the technician’s end. So that was disappointing that I wasn’t able to express my appreciation for his excellent expertise and troubleshooting skills, but at least a technician was coming to solve (dun-dun-dun-duuuuunnnn…) the Mystery of the Orange Light!

To be continued…

The Mystery of the Orange Light:
Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

It started out as a normal Saturday. It was October 8, 2005. Shortly after waking up, I proceeded to go through the steps of turning on my computer.

I successfully completed two out of the three steps I would normally take to turn on my computer. I first plugged in the surge protector. Then I flipped the surge protector on. Normally I would then press the power button on my computer, but I was startled to hear my computer turn on all by itself. Eek! It’s trying to take over the world!… uh, just kidding.

I looked at my Dell computer case. The power light was orange instead of normal “everything’s okay” green. The monitor was blank and its power light was also orange. And so began The Mystery of the Orange Light. Dun-dun-dun-duuunnn…

Although orange is one of my favorite colors, I knew my computer was not trying to appeal to my color favorites. Something was obviously wrong. I held down on the power button in an attempt to turn off the computer. It didn’t turn off. So I flipped off the surge protector. Of course, the computer turned off (I would get really freaked out if it didn’t…). I flipped the surge protector back on. The computer turned on by itself - again. I repeated this; same result. I held down the power button… longer. The computer finally turned off. Flip off, flip on, no automatic starting up. Whew!

After that was solved, I ran downstairs and made a beeline to the location where my computer’s packaging was stored. I grabbed my Dell Dimension 8400 User’s Manual and went upstairs. After a bit of searching through the manual, I found a section that read “If the power light is steady amber - a device might be malfunctioning or incorrectly installed.” It then suggested that I reseat the memory modules, the graphics card, and the other PCI cards in the case.

Oh, great. I was a little nervous about opening my case, though because this computer had died on me before I had had some experience with accessing the innards of my computer. After going through the routine of unplugging everything from the back, I pulled out the case into an open area, put it on its side, and opened it up.

My last computer failure was due to what appeared to be an overheated hard drive. So the first thing I did was to look for any evidence of high temperatures. I didn’t see any circuitry that looked or smelled like it had been through a barbeque, so I proceeded with the actions suggested in the manual.

I had two DDR2 RAM modules in the slots. I picked the one that was the most easily accessible and delicately took it out of its slot. The instructions then stated that in order to avoid damage to the module, I had to push straight down and push evenly on both ends of the module. If I did it correctly, the latches on both sides of the slot would snap into place to hold the module in position.

The RAM module would not go in. I tried pushing softly. I tried pushing hard. It didn’t go in. I wasn’t sure if I should push harder because I was afraid I would break it. In the end, my dad was able to help me get it back in. Turns out I had to “help it in” by closing the latches while pushing…

After spending about half an hour or more on that one module, I, of course, did not want to try the second. Nor did I want to try the graphics or PCI cards. So I closed the case.

I tried doing some mental troubleshooting. The job of finding the failed component was made even more difficult by the fact that the Dell Diagnostic lights on the back of the computer were off, which the manual said meant the computer is off or “a possible pre-BIOS error has occurred.” I started my thought processes with the list of components whose reseating was suggested by the manual. At first I thought it must be the graphics card, since there was no monitor output. I tried both the analog and digital cables of my LCD monitor with no success. When I thought about what the Dell Diagnostic lights were telling me, I thought “it couldn’t be that.” It must be something that would normally provide data to the graphics card. Otherwise the diagnostic lights would probably indicate a graphics card failure. Could it be the motherboard? The power supply? The power cord?

As I usually do when I’m stuck with a major hardware problem, I called my friend Jordan, who is quite knowledgeable in computer hardware, having built his own computer. He guessed that it probably had something to do with the power supply. He also suggested I check the connections on my motherboard. I checked the connections. No luck.

The only way I could think of as to test the power supply was to get a new one and see if it worked. Same with the other possibly-busted components. Ugh.

In summary, I was stuck. I was sure the warranty was expired. The only thing left that I could think of would be to call a local computer repair person later in the week.

And so concludes part 1 of The Mystery of the Orange Light! Dun-dun-dun-duuunnn…

To be continued.

(By the way, if you can guess what the problem is on the first try, I’ll be quite impressed.)

The Mystery of the Orange Light:
Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3