04/12/2003 @20:55:15 ^23:19:04

THE STORY OF CACO

An epic saga of the revivication of a sickly and intractable base unit, in several parts. Here are parts two and one. I just made a 2'38" in blastem2 and finally feel like I have a demo set I can publish, so fuck knows why I decided to write this instead.

3. For almost all of this part of the article, caco isn't even working

Everything had taken on an unearthly haze. I stared around at my beliefs, laying shattered on the ground around me. Technology had forsaken me. I had performed routine maintenance on a piece of computer hardware and it had become nothing more than an expensive doorstop.

Time passed. My brain stopped trying to implode and eventually began to wonder what had actually happened. At switch on, all the discs and fans would start. It would sound like it was booting normally. However, nothing appeared on screen and for some reason the green power light didn't go on. Next to the red hard disc light which wouldn't go off, this was pretty weird looking.

Unplugging all the disc drives etc didn't affect anything. I concluded it must be the motherboard, processor, or memory. The obvious thing to do was swap them with replacements. But the only replacements I had were in baron, and there was no way I was going to start poking around borrowing stuff out of there because having my confidence completely destroyed I knew that I'd fuck up my one remaining machine with internet capability.

I saw no way out. I became even more miserable and did nothing but lurk on the forums, the only sufficiently good distraction I knew. Occasionally I poked at the innards of the box, never to any avail. My mum said we should find a repair man from the yellow pages or whatever but it was like "what shut up I have no money it's all screwed I wish I was dead what the hell are you doing in here anyway go away"

Then everything changed. I spent two minutes typing into the unitemps website and all of a sudden I had a job. After two or three weeks the despair I felt whenever I saw caco's lifeless husk turned into something else! Now I felt I had the resources to get it fixed, but being out all day during the week I had no opportunity to take it anywhere. I was actually quite annoyed, but nevertheless it was an important shift in temperament.

Sometime around the end of October we contacted a guy who lived about five minutes away and who could come over and pick the thing up. It was unpleasant having to bring in outside help, but it was that or leave it dead. He brought it back a couple of days later, and charged a fee which, well, my mum thought it was very reasonable...

Still, caco was once again operational after over two and a half months, for the duration of most of which I was convinced it was dead. It was still way too noisy, but a liberal application of something the guy called "thermal grease" had halved the CPU temperature. More importantly the reason it had been broken was completely unexpected. The knowledge that the components which I thought I'd broken were in fact fine restored my faith in my ability to screw around with the inside of my computers.

Find out the cause of all the horror, next time! Christ, this shit is dragging on!