That Smokin' Computer

Last week my nephew Amos and I upgraded his computer. We ripped out the venerable Asus A7N8X and AGP 7600 GT video card (along with CPU and memory) and slapped in a Gigabyte socket 775 mobo, Intel E7300 Core 2 Duo, 9600GT and two gigs of DDR2. Now that thing runs iRacing real well!

But that's not what I'm going to write about. I have a new computer story you might be interested in. When Amos was considering his upgrade - nervous about the necessary Windows reinstall it would entail - I bragged about how my main computer was running great since I reinstalled Windows on my main machine in December, hoping to ease his trepidation.

This computer, my main desktop, has an Asus M2N32 SLI Deluxe mobo with an Athlon 64 X2 4200+ and a GeForce 7600 GT in a gorgeous Antec LAN Boy aluminum case. It's known as the NightMonster, and it served as my racing computer until I built a new machine for iRacing last spring.

A few days ago the NightMonster moved from the top of my desk to a stand on the floor after a second 19" monitor finally arrived (two and a half weeks after I bought it off of eBay, damn the Postal Service!) I loved that computer so much that when I built it I even gave it a page on my web site, complete with a photo shoot.

Well, last night it went kaput. I was sitting there, innocently typing a PM to a fellow racer in the iRacing member site, when both monitors went completely dark and the video card fan spun up to max loud.

Tried rebooting several times. I'd get into Windows, but within a few seconds the same thing would happen. Monitors went dark, fan spun up. I tried unplugging one monitor but no joy. Eventually it quit entirely; I'd hit the power button and nothing at all would happen.

I was really bummed when I went to bed last night, as you can imagine! My main computer was dead (thank the silicon gods for Mozy backup!) and I didn't know why.

This morning after procrastinating for a while I ripped that beastly NightMonster - the most troublesome computer I've ever built - out from under the desk.

I put the old lug on the table and tore into it. I unplugged everything - hard drives, optical drives, USB card reader, even the sound card - but it was still dead. Ripped out the power supply and plugged in the one that was in my Pat Dotson G-Seat. Nothing.

As a last resort I ripped out the video card and hit the power button again. Presto!! Booted right up! I was able to copy a big file (which had taken hours to acquire via my pokey "broadband" connection) from its shared folder across the LAN to another computer. Happy, happy!

But I couldn't log into it. I tried Remote Desktop, but no joy; I'd never thought to configure the NightMonster to allow logging in through Remote Desktop since the reinstall.

But some experimenting and and a little research led to the discovery of a series of keystrokes that would allow me to turn on Remote Desktop even though I couldn't see anything! Took a number of tries but I got it.

Now it's back under my desk, nothing but air where a video card should be - and I'm logged into it across the LAN from my laptop. Heehee!

This is called a "headless" system. Well, to be strictly accurate a headless system has no keyboard and mouse, either. I plugged my spare keyboard and mouse into the NightMonster but they aren't really necessary; I can do everything I need to, including shutting it down, from the laptop.

I was going to order a replacement 9600 GT like Amos's, but after poking around a little and reading customer comments on Newegg I decided to take a look at the 9800GTX+. I thought these killer cards were too big to fit in my compact little LAN Boy.

The original 9800 cards were 10.5" long, about a quarter of an inch too much for the LAN Boy, but it turns out that the newest rev is only 9.5" long and it should fit. When it comes I'm going to put it into Wolf (my iRacing computer, which also is inside a LAN Boy) and put Wolf's 8800 GT into the NightMonster.

But meanwhile I can run the NightMonster headless and still sync my calendar to my Treo and sync podcasts to my iPod. I'm up and running. Heh.

Update: I plugged one of my 19" monitors into the laptop's VGA out port and now I've got the NightMonster displaying its desktop on the monitor (via Remote Desktop), right next to the laptop, which is displaying its desktop on its own screen. Dual monitors again. Yay!

The downsides? The laptop's monitor is a squished 1440x900 resolution rather than the nice 1280x1024 I have when using the NightMonster with its usual monitor. Also I can't drag a window from the NightMonster's display to the laptop's like I do when I am running dual monitors, although I can drag windows from the laptop's display to the external monitor.

Last but not least, iTunes - apparently in a fit of pique because it can't detect a video card, ha ha - refuses to show anything in Cover Flow and has turned its normally tasteful black, white, and gray song listing a bizarre shade of lavender.

Other than these few niggles, it's great - and now I'm essentially running four CPU's (both machines are dual core) so everything's even faster than usual!

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Footnote. After the dust had settled I took a closer look at the dead video card and noticed that about half of its biggest capacitors had blown up. Seriously; their tops were split wide open. I slapped that thing into a zip lock bag real fast. Who knows what kind of nasty chemicals (PCBs? Mercury? Lead? Plutonium?) are inside those things.