Well, for number 28 it's another dead computer. Not work this time, but one I came home to - fortunately not mine! This one started making screaming beeps when you turned it on. This for some reason made me think of an amazing guy from way back in the eighties called Mike Cook. And this is kind of random, so bear with me. Mike Cook wrote for a very early Computer Magazine called Acorn User, which kept on running until 2005! He was the hardware guru, and his columns were often the wackiest yet most informative in the whole mag. I couldn't easily find an image of him, but I'm sure a beard and a cable knit sweater would be involved somewhere. But he had the most amazing mind and attitude. I remember one column where he was playing with some LEDs and LDRs, and wondered if he could fashion them into some kind of primitive touch screen that he could interface to the serial port. Sure enough, he busted out the soldering iron and made it work. That's British innovation at it's best! Sadly, those glory days are all but gone, but one piece of advice Mike gave out has stuck with me. He said "For the computer to do anything at all it has to be 95% working". With today's modularised systems, I'm not so sure that that is still true. You can have a major component failure and it will usually still give some kind of diagnostic information. Back in the early nineties it was great, because your network card, video card, sound card, even hard disk controller were all separate slot in modules and if one failed you just replaced it. Now we've gone full circle and everything is built into the motherboard again, so if one part fails you have to replace the lot. In the past year I've had to learn a lot about fixing machines pretty quickly, and I'm not bad at it now (not great, but not bad) so for this I followed some basic principles I picked up. Once power to the box is verified if it does nothing it's probably PSU. If it spins up then does nothing it's probably RAM. This proved to be the case here and the RAM had indeed gone pop. Dave had some spare and now the machine is back up.

Dayron Arias Magazine, October 2011 is here featuring the best Halloween food to eat this season. Halloween Haunt All You Fear is Here. This issue offers a complete menu, and how to save money when you travel to Europe this fall. Dayron Arias Magazine explores all aspects of the cultural lifestyle including cooking, entertaining, travel, and dining out.