Computers Drive Me Nuts.

May 15th? Sheesh! It's been a long time since I posted anything here!

Well, not to wallow in self-pithy, excuses or overly long contemplation of the navel, we will continue on.

Did I ever mention the fact the computers drive me nuts?

I finally tried to upgrade from my old dual PIII/500 main desktop (the Frankenstein) to a P4/2GHz motherboard. I didn't have a case to put it in, so I just tried to lay it out on a wooden board. Actually, it worked pretty well there, sitting on top of the SCSI enclosure where I put the 3x9Gig drives. It had a reasonable NVIDIA video card, and 768Meg of RAM. I was even able to over-clock the P4 to 2.666GHz, if I boosted the core voltage by a tenth of a volt. I regularly checked the cooling fins to make sure it wasn't getting too hot, and it never got more than slightly warm to the touch. One time when I got a process locked up where it was using 100% of the CPU for a long time, it did get a little warmer, but I didn't see any problems after that.

The system ran just fine there for a couple of weeks. I think this is the biggest jump in compute power that I've ever had, and I have to say I was pretty happy with the system. All I needed was a case to wrap it up and make it pretty.

Of course, I'm wondering now if it was the over-clocked that did me in...

I had an old case I'd pulled a toasted motherboard out of. (Queue: eerie soundtrack.) The power supply seemed OK -- in fact that was the power supply I was using for "Son of Frankenstein". All I had to do was pull out the old MB, and install the new one. Simple, eh?

Got everything put together, and hit the power button. Nothing. Nada. Started to sweat. Started disconnecting peripherals. Nothing. Pulled the entire system out and laid it out exactly as it had been before. Zilch. I think I now have two toasted motherboards. I have no idea what might have failed on the motherboard, but I don't even get the fan on the CPU cooler spinning up, and there's no signal on the video output.

One good sign was that I took out the CPU and put it in another computer and it worked fine, so at least that wasn't the problem. I don't think it is the RAM, though I haven't had a way to check that yet. The only sign that I have of any sort of problem is a slight bulge in the motherboard under the CPU. I don't know if it was there before, but it's entirely possible, since I did get the board used.

So, now I'm back to the old computer. Fortunately, since I have a Linux network, all of my critical files were on the file server, so I didn't lose anything significant. However, it still torques me that the new system was working FINE before, and I had to go and mess with it.

*sigh* Oh well. Sometimes I never learn.