Hardware

I just added another external hard drive to my Linux system, and now I'm wondering about a few potential issues....

For some reason it seems like I'm just not very lucky with computers right now... After my recent (and still somewhat ongoing) PC issues, my laptop gave up over the Thanksgiving weekend. This is a Compaq Presario R3000Z that is less than half a year old and that I'm otherwise extremely happy with. All of a sudden, the screen stopped working....

After some research and comparison shopping, I decided to buy the following components to replace my defective motherboard: Athlon64 3000+ CPU, Winchester core with 90nm process. These run significantly cooler than their older 0.13Micron siblings and have better overclocking potential. Asus A8V Deluxe motherboard. This VIA K8T800Pro based board has a Socket 939 that supports the latest Winchester core Athlons and hopefully will be supported for a while. More importantly for me, the board has 3 regular (Parallel ATA) IDE connectors in addition to the 4 SATA connectors. Most motherboards these days seem to be moving towards SATA, which is certainly a good thing, but as I still have quite a few Parallel ATA devices (DVD-ROM, DVD-R/W, and 4 hard drives), I need at least 3 PATA connectors. Of course, I could always buy a separate controller PCI card, but I prefer this simpler solution. The A8V Deluxe has been getting good reviews, so I should be fine. 2 Corsair 512MB PC3200 DIMMs. I went with their value line, which may not yield the same performance as some of the higher quality memory, but nonetheless it is officially supported by my motherboard and supports dual channel. For the most part, I am very happy with this combination, although I still have some serious problems. Read below for more......

It turned out that it's not the power supply. I guess I should have known, as the LEDs on the motherboard still light up. At this point it seems most likely that the motherboard is fried. This itself isn't too bad, as my motherboard and processor are about 2 1/2 years old now and they weren't exactly cutting edge back then....

This morning my PC's video display suddenly shut down. When I tried to reboot it, it got through the initial boot sequence and died again right after it switched into graphics mode during the Windows startup. As I had similar problems with my previous ATI card, I wasn't particularly surprised... I turned the PC off and decided to troubleshoot the problem after work....