Apparently it has been too long since I was last on my computer.
For reasons I will explain (later, not today) it has been about two months since I was last on my computer. During that time I have lived the hobo’s existence on the computer of others–while spending most of my time doing other, non-computer things. But, at last, life has been brought close enough to normal that I recently dug my computer out of storage.
It was supposed to be a simple and easy thing, that comforting return to the familiar and normal life. The computer went into storage working, so it was supposed to come out of storage working. And it would have, mostly, except I was tired, it had been a long time since I used my computer, and I wasn’t thinking.
I brought computer and monitor upstairs and plugged everything into what I thought were the right places. Then I turned my computer on . . . and I got nothing. More precisely, I saw nothing. Now, looking back, I can tell you that I had forgotten I had two places I could plug a monitor into on my computer. Most computers have only one place to plug in your monitor. I, however, had an original motherboard built-in video connection . . . that was (as best I can figure) bad . . . and a installed video card that I had been using.
Well, two months had elapsed, with a lot of work occurring in that time, and I forgot this little tidbit of information. When I leaned over the back of the computer I saw the monitor plug slot and I plugged the monitor in without further thought. Thus began my self-induced troubles.
For some reason after the computer finished booting my Linux OS somehow managed to make the monitor work in a less than fully functional way. I could see my desktop on the screen but it was at the wrong resolution and not working properly. Even so, I could see that I had a message saying my computer BIOS battery was dead. That was no big surprise since since the computer had been without power for nearly two months. But it was a red herring because I thought all my problems might be traced back to a bad BIOS battery.
What followed was the typical trouble-shooting that any computer hobbyist is all too familiar with. First a second monitor is brought in. When that didn’t resolve the monitor trouble a new 3V lithium battery was found for the BIOS. (Being me, I managed to snap one of the holding tabs for the battery case when I replaced it.) When that didn’t resolve the problem, a old video card was dug up and stuck into the computer. With the monitor plugged into this video card the monitor now came on as soon as the computer was booted up. At this point I finally re-learned what I had already known before: the built-in video was not working properly. Alas, but I still had not recalled, or noticed, that I already had a video card installed.
I didn’t discover the previously installed video card until the next day. If my brain had been fully functioning then I would have went, “Ah, now I remember–this is the video card I was using” and all would have been well. Instead I thought, “Hmmm, this must be some video card I installed awhile ago and it didn’t work so I just left it there because I was too lazy to pull it back out.” And then I proceeded to pull the said video card out, unwittingly further breaking my computer on myself.
It was only after I spent a good amount of time (hours) trying to make the video card I had scrounged up work that the depths of my mind began stirring. A glimmer became a burst of light and I remembered. Nothing was broken except what I broke. I was simply breaking things as fast as I was trying to fix them, and if I only went back and set everything as it was before I had touched it, everything would work just fine.
So . . . I did that, it worked, and I felt . . . well, stupid. At moments like this, when perhaps nearly eight hours total have been spent in the futility of idiocy, one struggles to see the bright side of things. I say, well, now I know more about Linux because in those hours of struggling to make video cards work I learned about files like XF86Config-4. And, in learning about this file I actually discovered the solution to a different long-running problem I was having with my Linux display. It turned into a worthwhile learning experience.
Worth hours of time fiddling around with self-made problems?
Oh hush.
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