[BITList] Computer problems

[HUGH MCINTYRE]

Frank,

You are spot on.  I suspected the battery, having had battery problems 
before, both with this PC and my little hand- held Dell, though the latter 
was a plain back-up memory battery. For the PC, it reached the point where I 
installed a new motherboard (2004). Re the present setup, I checked the PC 
battery and found it still gave 3V, but I put a new one in anyway, and it 
changed nothing. I recall with the hand-held a couple of years back that the 
on/off button ceased to work, and it was telling me the back-up battery was 
low (why don't its big brothers do the same?), but putting in a new one 
changed nothing. Eventually, after about a year of this nonsense, I stuck in 
the old battery again, and the damned thing immediately sorted itself out. 
Maybe I'll try it with the PC. It's a new attitude to problems, but where's 
the logic? I am reminded of the situation I found on GTV Morar when I joined 
her as her first ever 2E/O in her 18 month career to that point - I took 
over from Harry McKee, a Chief sailing as 1E/O as an obligement.  She was 
apt to come to a halt on sight of an aggressive seagull, more or less, and 
we used to spend the watches reading the manuals. One favourite problem was 
a hung-up fuel pump ram, and the accepted method had come down to removing 
the old and installing the new - she carried a great many spare rams all 
wrapped in greased paper. The rest accepted this as normal life, but I'd 
been brought up in Kincaids and BI, so after a few failures of replacement 
rams I instituted an investigation. This annoyed the Chief, but everything 
that smacked of organisation annoyed that idiot, witness the state of the ER 
and the apathy of the staff.  I found that nobody aboard could tell an "old" 
ram, all wrapped in greased paper, from a "new" ram, ditto, both types being 
randomly sat on the same shelf in the store.  So the whole process was a 
lottery - lacking a microscope, it was impossible to tell if it was an old 
or a new ram that had solved/not solved the problem.

Regards,

Hugh.