Tottering but upright

The Windows machine crashed yet again last week, and had an odd message in the Event Log about removal media I just don't have. Huh. I guess the USB card reader must have confused Windows enough to make it think something had been plugged in that wasn't.

So I pulled the machine apart yet again. All the cables on the front panel unit are "glued" down. It doesn't seem likely that they've broken. So I prodded all the connections that cables made from it to the motherboard. It's possible something there was not quite right. It all looked OK, but...

The machine now recognised the card readers again and can see data on the cards. Maybe that's enough!

Rearranging the basement

When I arranged things in my basement I put a corner aside for my computers; in the corner I built a metal rack with 4 shelves and put a desk on each of the walls. This worked well, except there really wasn't enough space to get to the front of the machines on the second shelf (the first shelf was close to the floor, the third and fourth shelfs high enough, but the second shelf meant the computers had the desk half way up). I'd been pulling the Windows machine out a lot frequently to try and find why it was crashing and this involved moving one of the desks each time. A bit of a pain.

So today I spent a few hours rearranging things, replacing one desk with a smaller one (so I can now get to the front of the rack) and rearranging what's on each desk. The games machines are now near the stairs, next to the TV/DVD I watch when exercising, and the keyboard/mouse/monitor is now under the window, along with KVMs, switch, router, cablemodem etc. Cables are a little tight (I think I should get at least one set of extender cables, maybe two... but I only need 1 foot for the two short cables! I also need a speaker cable extension) but it all seems to work.

Not that I spend much time down there, but at least I can get the machines out.