Cleaning
Posted on November 2, 2003
This weekend has more or less been dedicated to cleaning my apartment. First of all, I’m fairly lazy, so I had things strewn about the floor, and one of my tables/desks had quite a bit of junk mail on it. Plus, I finally decided that I really wasn’t going to do anything with some of those old computer parts, so I ended up pitching a 7 year old 14″ monitor, a 5 year old 15″ monitor, an old AT form factor mid-tower computer case, 3 years worth of phone books (at least it seemed like 3 years worth), and 4 bags of garbage. I still have to get rid of 2 old printers (one of them is a dot-matrix), and some more trash, but Since it was a weekend and the beginning of the month, there were a few people moving in and out, so the dumpster got full fairly quickly…plus the dumpster serves 2 apartment buildings. At least it gets emptied twice a week.
In addition to general cleaning, I also decided to rearrange my apartment. I moved my computer desk and when I was getting the computer set back up, I had poblems getting it to run. The computer would start beeping on starting. I have had this happen before, and I thought it was related to the heat. Usually, I would turn on the air conditioner and once the apartment got cooler (about 72 degrees or less), the computer would start beck up. Not so this time. Figuring it was a problem with the BIOS, I changed out the motherboard. Luckily, I had a new unopened motherboard ready to go from a couple of years ago. This motherboard also has a set of diagnostic LED’s with it, so if there is a problem, a person will be able to isolate it. This one would go to all red and stay there almost right off the bat. According to the manual, this means that the processor is bad, or at least installed incorrectly. As it happens, I saved the old AMD Duron processor I had before I upgraded to an AMD Athlon. I swapped out the processor and now I’m not having those problems. The Athlon I had was a mobile Athlon. I had ordered a regular Athlon and got a mobile one, so I don’t know how big of a difference there is between them, or if that was the reason for the processor going bad. During the motherboard exchange, I did take the time to clean out the case and I even took apart the processor heatsink and fan assembly to really clean it up. It’s amazing how much shit accumulates in the vanes of the heatsink and onthe blades of the miniature fan.
Anyway, the computer is now working again, and my apartment looks partly spiffy (like partly sunny). There is still a bit to do with the cleaning, but I’ll work on that later during the week or next weekend, after the dumpster has been emptied again. I still have to tackle the kitchen (a big job), the bathroom (a little job), and I also plan on getting rid of some old clothes that are taking up valuable closet space. The old clothes are like the old computer parts. I’m not going to do anything with them, but I kept them around because “you never know when you’re going to need them.” Basically, I don’t need them, will never need them, and even if I do need them, I can always buy some more. Mostly they are old work clothes I had from when i was a printer, so the shirts and pants have stains, holes, and glue all over them. Better to get rid of them.
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