\jeff{krimmel}

My Computer is Back Up and Running

The most recent adventure with my personal computer is now complete, and I am reasonably satisfied with the result. About a month ago, I had noticed that the X Window Server (the graphical user interface for my Linux installation) would freeze up after forty-five minutes or so of use. I was using a generic video driver, so I decided to go to NVidia’s website and download their native Linux driver. X ran just fine after that, with the small complaint that every now and again I would see seemingly random debris on the screen. If I opened Adobe Acrobat Reader with no PDF file, I would see some crud on the grey background. Every now and then a website would show some miscellaneous screen artifact, and this would be fixed afer minimizing and maximizing the window.

I decided to back up all of my data, reformat my hard drive, and re-install Linux. I had even thought of switching Linux distributions from Fedora to Debian. I ran through an installation of Debian, and somewhere along the way I had messed up (as happened the one time I tried to install Debian before; I find Debian very tough to install properly). I ran through another install of Debian after looking on my lab computer for some additional instructions, and for some reason the installer failed to initialize my network interface card using DHCP. That was weird, because the installer had succeeded at the same task during the previous installation. I decided to get rid of Debian and go back to Fedora, and as the installer was just beginning the package installation, I received a fatal error and was told the computer was rebooting. I found this quite odd because the media was known to be good; I had used it to install Fedora on some of the lab computers.

I rebooted and ran Fedora’s self-test of my installation media, and the media failed. I took another known good CD (the Knoppix CD), and my computer failed to boot it, printing to the screen a ton of errors along the way. This was more than coincidence. I took both my CD-RW and my DVD-ROM out of my home computer and brought them into the lab. I attached both to my lab computer (with the IDE cable from home), and this time they both showed the media as passing. At this point, I thought the error would be found in either the motherboard, the system memory, or the processor (in order from most likely to least). The Knoppix CD also had a memory test included, and after bringing my CD drives back home, I ran the memory test for a few hours and found no errors. I was reasonably convinced by this point that the motherboard was to blame.

I went to Fry’s on Friday afternoon and found two motherboard I liked (both from ABIT). One was $59.99, and the other was $99.99. The one for $99.99 definitely had better features (two SATA connections and four DIMM slots), but they were out of stock. I decided to go with the cheaper board (with no SATA connections and two DIMM slots), and after bringing it home and swapping boards, I ran through the installation process with no trouble at all. It was quite refreshing to have my guess of the source of the trouble vindicated, but it’s frustrating not to know why the motherboard was causing all of those installation problems.

I decided the cheaper motherboard wasn’t a bad idea because while it doesn’t offer me as many features in the way of future upgrades, it’s looking more and more like I’m going to be buying myself a Mac Mini for my birthday, and my current computer will become my secondary home computer. When I get another computer after the Mac Mini, it will likely be one with a 64 bit processor, so the fancier motherboard would not help me with the upgrade anyway. I am anxious to try out the Mac Mini, though. I’ve been hearing good things.