Chateau Keyboard

Friday, April 25: Taking in the sick

John brings his PC round this afternoon for me to have a furkle at it. It won't connect to the Internet and is generally misbehaving so I keep it in for the weekend. And then John drops a hint as to why it might be playing up - it was struck by lightning last year…
A new, external modem later it's connecting without any problems. The virus scan came up negative and a good vacuuming and disk defrag later it's running, or rather limping.
The - newish - internal modem (replaced after the lightning strike, apparently) works fine in other machines but not in his.
The sound card finally works when I take it out and notice that it's actually a Turtle Beach model, not one from Yamaha as John had thought. Removing the Yamaha drivers and replacing them with something more appropriate from Turtle Beach produces appropriate noises, but it won't work in any other slots on the motherboard. The modem works in that sound card slot too, so the conclusion is that several of the PCI slots were fried by the lightning.
John had wanted to upgrade this machine with a CDRW drive, more memory and what have you but I have to advise him that this isn't going to be worthwhile - the motherboard seems to be closing down slowly, there are no slots and he's going to be lots better off with a new machine. And a surge protector.