Brothers (and any sisters who lurk this deeep in the realms of gameyness)
I have recieved a message through my computer, it died last spring. Hard drives ticked and then ceased ticking, Mobo went pop, failure to post beeps were all over the shop and then finally the PC did not even beep... (it took about 4 days and 20 reboots before nothing happened at all)
Rest in pieces you good old amd 1800 gig or ram, geforce 5600... because bits and bobs had been acting funky for a while I didn't trust stripping down bits for a rebuild and prices were good so I bought a nice cheap pc to tide me over(amd64 3200 2gig ram geforce 7600gs)
So over the last year, i've been using the new one and spare. I'd return to the old ones grave occassionally, check the wires, try to get a post.. try to recover data from the hard drives by sticking them in external caddys etc. After a few month of trying I handed it on to a mate formerly of PC world repair lot now IBMy, he tried for a few months... and then signed off on the autopsy as multiple organ failure caused by dodged heart\power supply.
I carried on digging away, occassionally I'd swap out a piece with another spare- see if that did the trick(it never did). But always end up putting it back the way it was and using the newer spare elsewhere.
Today about a year (ish) on, i stuck it (in its dead state with no swapped bits in) in front of my downstairs system, pulled the keyboard and stuff wires over, switched it on (waiting for the beeps off doom, or the silence of death)...... and it posted (you know white writing saying what it is, check ram, looks for hard drive goes on a step or two and then says system disk failure because it can't find a hard drive). Even more surprisingly (given the ridiculous fragile nature of hard drives) when I tried the one that had sat dormant in the caddy for the last 6 months or so...it came up as an 80gig external hard drive (with some of the files on it ).It had been ticking like a clock even before the PC broke, it was a rotten corpse whilst the rest of it was still fresh.
So I know the "switch it off and on again".(IT crowd Lol)
And I'm a firm believer in the voodoo of the unplug leave it over night and try again in the morning.
but has anyone else had such a long voodoo moment?
IBM guy is terrified because I just justified all of our elephant graveyards of broken PC bits and shells in our attics.

I recently resurrected an old laptop (Acer 760ic, 486DX50) with a cheap second hand hard drive, it had been sat in the attic for about 7 years waiting for me to do something with it, I was convinced it was well and truly stuffed but to keep my son away from the work laptop I decided to give it one last try. Even better is that the battery still keeps a decent charge too

Up till last week it was running fine, although it sees the 6GB drive as 249MB, and then I stupidly tinkered in the BIOS to try to get it to recognise more of the hard drive. Now I have to reinstall Windows (3.11, only 4MB RAM makes risking even Windows 95 unlikely, and having only a 3.5" floppy means it's somewhat time consuming) as it's decided it no longer has any partitions (but at least the drive still spins up )

Cough (and feel free to delete) didn't they do a win95 lite, very similar to how you can now get optimised version of win xp that are only 128 meg big Win 95 is so much better than 3.11 and once you've put 3.11 on you then have to dig up norton windows and task bar add on, so that it makes any sense to any of the newer generation

My son and daughter both had no trouble using Win 3.11 on the laptop, despite their PC upstairs having Windows XP on it.

Win 95 will run on 4MB - it just doesn't run very well. My first desktop PC was a 486DX66 (well, a DX25, but I replaced the CPU with a DX66 I found spare at work, and a new 66Mhz mobo crystal I got from Maplins) with 8MB and Win95 was pretty sucky.

I've been trying to track down a second hand 16MB 72-pin SODIMM so I can upgrade it to 20MB (it can take a single 72-pin stick to upgrade), but all I can find is 144-pin. I can spend £40 on a new 72-pin SODIMM stick but I'm loathe to fork out that much just so I can slap Win 95/98 on it. If I can get Win98 (min 16MB required) on, I might be able to get one of those modern PCMCIA Wi-fi cards to work and get it hooked up to the net (none of them work with Win95 apparently ...)

Spack wrote:Win 95 will run on 4MB

I've seen it run from floppy(no jacket\HD required), but thats just pure weasel dom, and I can't remember how much more than drag and drop worked.(e.g. I'm failry sure direct x had to take a vacation.)

Spack wrote:I might be able to get one of those modern PCMCIA Wi-fi cards to work and get it hooked up to the net (none of them work with Win95 apparently ...)

Don't forget about card buss issues, whenever me and friends have tried doing anything clever with pcima stuff on legacy laptops its always just the wrong side of the cardbuss era stuff and requires lots of trips to buy multiple variants of stuff (maplins are brilliant for returns due to stuff like that if you walk in)