What happened was that it occurred to me I had a bunch of quite important stuff on the hard drive in the machine I was about to send to the other end of the country, stuff I might need before I got it back, so I tried to remove the hard drive so I could put it in an enclosure and copy what I needed. Only, when I went to do it, I found I couldn't get the drive out. It's super-neatly tucked away and fixed, firmly, with a couple of screws, one of which appears to be accessible only by dismantling the entire case.
That would involve opening the one and only section that has a "Warranty void if opened" sticker, which seemed like it might be a bad idea, seeing as how I was about to return it under warranty. To get around it, there was even a moment when I was contemplating running cables to the drive from one PC while it was still installed in the other and trying to get into the files that way... but then I had an unusual moment of clarity and realised what a fucking stupid idea that would be and didn't do it.
While I was fiddling around in the case, trying to get to the last screw, I removed the PSU, although I didn't disconnect it. I also pulled the connectors out of the hard drive but I'd also done that yesterday and it had no effect on anything then. Those, as far as I know, are the only things I did.
If I was a sensible person, I'd have left it that and gone back to the replacement machine but I'm pathologically incapable of letting things lie in these situations. I can't help thinking "I wonder if..." Since it only meant plugging a couple of cables into the back, I connected the dead PC to the monitor (Via the integrated graphics port since the GPU was already in the other machine.) and powered it up, just to see what would happen.
Well, kinda. At least the monitor received a signal, which is more than I could get it to do in four hours of fiddling with it yesterday.
It didn't exactly log in. It did that thing where it told me there was a problem and it was fixing it. Then it told me it couldn't fix it so it offered me a couple more options to try. I plugged in a keyboard and mouse, connected it back up to the network and after a couple more "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave" moments it offered me some more choices, one of which was just to start Windows and see what happened.
So I did. And it worked. Again, only not kinda this time. It actually, properly worked.
I immediately set about changing the video drivers. That was what stopped the replacement PC sending a signal yesterday, right after I updated it to the latest GeForce drivers. I had them down as #1 suspect.
I was in on the integrated graphics, though, and those are Radeon. But as it happens, I've been getting an error message about them every time I log in pretty much since I bought the machine. I assumed it was because I was using an Nvidia GPU and there was some kind of minor conflict but now it was still doing it without the card even being in the case...
So I updated the Radeon drivers and the message went away. How about that? Who'd have thought? Thing must have shipped with the wrong drivers to begin with, although the ones it was using did still work.
Next. I re-installed the GeForce 4060 and went to roll back the drivers to the previous ones that used to work just fine, only the roll-back option was greyed out. So I went to Nvidia's website, picked one from a month ago, before the problems started, and installed that instead. Then I went into Windows Defender and added all the individual Neverness .exe files to the whitelist and the whole folder to the Exception list just to be on the safe side.
Finally, I logged into the game, just to see what would happen. It's a always a thrill ride around here, I can tell you.
It was a new installation on the external SDD. I uninstalled and reinstalled yesterday, when I was trying to get it to run over there - without success, I might add - and then I played NTE for about twenty minutes.
The final test came when I logged out, of course. That's when the trouble was going to start, if there was any coming.
But this time nothing bad happened. I hung around for a while, waiting. Still nothing. I read a few blogs. Still nothing. Then started this one and I'd been at it a while before it was time for tea. I powered the machine down - another test of sorts - then I came back an hour later and powered it on again.
And it worked. Normally. No halts, error messages or crashes. Here I am now, typing the last couple of paragraphs and everything still seems fine.
I have no clue what got me in. I don't know if any of the changes I've made will mean I can stay. It might be a permanent fix or tomorrow I might be back where I started. I'd be a lot happier if I knew how I managed to get the thing working again But I'll take the win anyway. I was not looking forward to boxing the thing up and sending it off so anything that means I don't have to bother is good with me.
I really hope this is the last time I'll be posting about computer issues, at least for a while. I wouldn't count on it, though. Remember the old superstition about things only work when you give up trying to make things happen and start complaining about it instead?. It used to be a meme in EverQuest back before there were memes, particularly when people were trying to spawn the Ancient Cyclops for the J-Boots quest.
Funny how often it seems to happen that way, isn't it?
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