After much computer misery, I have returned. Hard drive corruption, severe booting issues (eg not powering up except for the fans), major stability problems and overall system flakiness appear to have been fixed now that I have replaced the motherboard and PSU on my system. The PSU had three leaky/burst capacitors, which probably explains why the old mobo was reporting the 12V rail as only providing 10.4V :0 The motherboard itself was a bit of a deadend as well (AGP4x, only supported up to 2100+XP chips, and I think the onboard RAID sockets were dying) so it's been good to replace it as well.
While I didn't end up needing to buy the future-proof(ish) components that I thought I might (and was starting to think might be nice to have) such as a Socket939 mobo, PCI-E gfx card and a beefy PSU, I did end up finding a SocketA motherboard at the local computer fair that will at least allow me to update to a Sempron chip in the future as well as an AGP8x gfx card if I find for some unknown reason that I have too much money. Oh, and now I have SATA headers as well! Tasty.
What doth this meaneth to the peopleth? Beardy pics will be forthcoming. Once my last assignment and two exams are complete (a networking assignment, networking exam and Java/programming exam), I'll have the time to pull them off the camera and upload them.
Having a brand new hard drive also means that I was able to take the opportunity to remove the last piece of "dodgy" software off my system. Instead of using a dubiously obtained copy of Microsoft Office 2000, I'm doing a test drive of OpenOffice.org 2.0. I'm hoping to discover that OOo has everything I need. If it turns out either Helen or myself need something that only MS can provide well I'll break down and get an Academic version. They're not upgradeable but I wouldn't want to. Besides, my next system is going to be a Mac anyway (when I can afford it).
One final point - I take back all the nice things I said about A.i.tech and their webfront pc.net.au. When trying to source parts for my dying computer, I found that they were one of the few places that still stocked Socket A motherboards. I placed an order on a Friday morning before the long weekend. I wasn't able to determine with them until 4:30 that afternoon that despite the fact that they had quite a number of different models listed on the website, they didn't actually have any Socket A motherboards in stock. To make matters worse, these guys charge your credit card first and then check to see if they have the stock at hand. While they offered to cancel my order and refund my credit card, it left me in a difficult place financially in the weekend before payday with several hundred dollars floating around in the ether while I waited for my card to be credited.
Thankfully, the good ol' ACT Computer Fair came through. They had a nice ASUS A7V-600-X motherboard for around $90 (I have no idea if that's cheap - the important thing was that it was available on a long weekend and I had assignments to do). I also managed to pick up an Antec SmartPower 2.0 PSU for a good price. Of course, changing motherboards meant that I then had to go out and find somewhere that stocked thermal paste on a Sunday of a long weekend. I eventually found a small shop open in Civic and I got to geek out, hardware style, and apply my first ever lashings of thermal paste to a CPU stock heatsink. Next upgrade is some decent cooling I think :)
-s
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment