More tech problems - not site related this time.

[Wayne]

Well, it's been a fun week here. After the recent DDoS attack on the site it was nice to have a bit of calm again. Wednesdays are my "day off" from the site, when I meet up with my friend and we go out for the day. We decided to pop into a pub for a meal, and while we were waiting I threw a couple of pound into the fruit machine, only to win £50. I'd been wanting to upgrade the RAM in my system from 16gig to at least 32 for a while so this was the perfect opportunity. A quick look showed that my local CEX had a 32gig stick in store. The plan at this stage was to put the RAM in my system and upgrade my friend's PC with the old stuff. We went back to my house for me to install the RAM, convinced it'd be a 2 minute job. Swapping RAM in a PC is a 2 minute job. At least it usually is. Shut the PC down, take the side panel off, unclip the RAM and pop the new stuff in. When you turn it back on it should show you have the new RAM installed. It's that simple. Except it wasn't. Well, the bit up to turning the PC back on was easy. After that it all went pear shaped. I turned the PC back on to - NOTHING. The fans spun, but that was a far as it went. I swapped the RAM back to the old stuff and it worked again. Put in one old stick along with the new stick and the PC booted, but Windows would only see the single old stick. Weirdly though, the BIOS would show both sticks. OK, so some dodgy RAM has to be the issue here. I restarted once again with the old sticks and couldn't get Windows to load. The spinny thing on the screen would spin and spin and spin but that was it. Now I was worried the RAM had in some way damaged my Windows installation or even worse - my PC. No matter what I did, nothing would work. As it happened I had another set of RAM sticks that would work in my friend's PC. I dropped him back home and fitted that RAM into his PC. Other than having to make one quick alteration to the BIOS to allow the RAM to run at full speed it was a doddle. Took 5 minutes to swap it and do all the checks. When I got back home Windows was working again. I figured it must have done the "Windows Repair" and fixed the problem. I turned it off and back on again only to have the same issue. This time however I decided to just leave it run for as long as it took and did some browsing on my tablet. Eventually a message popped up saying my D drive had been repaired. Well well well, maybe I was unlucky enough for one of my drives to fail at the same time as I swapped the RAM. Sure enough, unplugging the drive saw the PC go back to normal. Plugging it back in saw the fault return. So the drive had definitely failed at the same time. Then I remembered the last time I'd done a system speed test after installing my new graphics card it had said the drive tests hadn't been completed. The drive must have been on its last legs for a while before. I put in a spare drive to replace it and all was back to normal. I lost some stuff, but nothing essential. Mainly some games I could just download again anyway. I took the RAM back the day after and explained that it was faulty. They did a test to confirm it and came to the same conclusion. One refund and an order from elsewhere later, my PC is now all up and running again with the new RAM working fine. I then spent today working on my internet speed as that had dropped recently. Swapping some hardware around means I'm now getting speeds back where they should be. Why am I telling you all this? Well, it shows that it's not just the site that gives me issues. Real life can be just as stressful sometimes.