An elderly customer asked me to look into a problem with his computer (it wouldn’t start).

The power light came on, but nothing on the screen.

It took me a while to figure out how to open up the PC (had to pop off the front panel, in order to get to the screws…). While dismantling the pc, I hear clunking sound from inside the computer… I don’t like the sound of this!

Once open, I see that the CPU fan and heatsink had fallen off. Since its probably a P2 of P3 CPU, I’m pretty sure the CPU is fried.

I reconnect the heatsink and fan, but it doesn’t help. Customer is happy for me to get him a new ‘box’.

After getting the new PC and his old PC, I transplant the original HDD and floppy, restart & reconfigure all the new devices (he was running windows 98se, so it copes better that XP, when you transplant the HDD into a new box.

I connect up the internet & try doing a windows update, but microsoft returns the error 0x80072F89. I try it a different way, and i get: 0x800C0005. Now I’ve seen this problem before, but cannot remember what I did to fix it… I search the internet, and I eventually find mention that the problem is related to IE5…

It finally dawns on me: microsoft no longer allows you to run updates for win98 running ie5. I need to download and install ie6, before I can even start doing any other updates.

Having stumbled on this once before, I don’t think I’ll forget it in a hurry.