Computer repairs
Jun. 7th, 2011 01:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
johnridleyNeat, the power supply I picked out yesterday went on sale AND had a rebate start today, so $25 instead of $50. I was debating a full refresh versus just getting the thing going again, and had to step back and realize that this machine is at least twice the machine I actually need, so I should just get it going again. 4 cores and 4GB of RAM is vastly more than I need 98% of the time, and is perfectly adequate the rest of the time. Heck, 98% of the time the old single core machine with 1GB of RAM is plenty, though the RAM is a bit skinny.
Once I decided to just fix, I realized that all of the socket 775 / DDR2 mainboards used the Intel G31 chipset, and they all look like they were designed straight from the Intel Reference sheet, so it hardly matters which one I grab. I picked the ASRock at $40. There was a Jetway at $38 but bad reviews, and 4 or 5 others for between $45 and $90. I guess ASRock is Asus plus some other company merged. I'll give them a try.
I think this is the first time I've had a mainboard fail on a clone that I built. Up until now the only thing I've really ever had fail was equipment that came on a purchased PC. We had some RAM fail on the family's current Dell last year, and last week the power supply on it failed (this power supply is to replace that one, it's currently running an underpowered spare out of an old Compaq). I had a hard drive fail that shipped with a Compaq a few years back. I had a mainboard on a laptop fail once. We had the hard drive on Kate's laptop fail last year. I can't recall ever having any parts fail that I'd installed afterward on purchased PCs, or any on machines that I built, except if they had been damaged by external forces (lightning, dropping).
Once I decided to just fix, I realized that all of the socket 775 / DDR2 mainboards used the Intel G31 chipset, and they all look like they were designed straight from the Intel Reference sheet, so it hardly matters which one I grab. I picked the ASRock at $40. There was a Jetway at $38 but bad reviews, and 4 or 5 others for between $45 and $90. I guess ASRock is Asus plus some other company merged. I'll give them a try.
I think this is the first time I've had a mainboard fail on a clone that I built. Up until now the only thing I've really ever had fail was equipment that came on a purchased PC. We had some RAM fail on the family's current Dell last year, and last week the power supply on it failed (this power supply is to replace that one, it's currently running an underpowered spare out of an old Compaq). I had a hard drive fail that shipped with a Compaq a few years back. I had a mainboard on a laptop fail once. We had the hard drive on Kate's laptop fail last year. I can't recall ever having any parts fail that I'd installed afterward on purchased PCs, or any on machines that I built, except if they had been damaged by external forces (lightning, dropping).
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Date: 2011-06-08 11:50 pm (UTC)1. It only has 4 SATA ports.
2. The RTL 8111c Gigabit Ethernet chip, which Ubuntu (and linux in general) will occasionally assign the wrong driver to, knocking the machine off the internet after an update.
Presumably your G31 based board will be much the same.
That machine has 1 250 GB PATA boot drive, a PATA LG DVD-RW, a fanless video card, a radio/video input card, 2 2TB drives, and 2 1 TB drives. The processor is pre-Core Duo, and I only have one stick of RAM in it, so I'm not getting the advantage of dual channels on the RAM.
The power supply is an Antec Earthwatts 380; despite being perhaps a bit underpowered, it has worked quite well for several years.
I'm upping the RAM and thinking about messing with updating the CPU to Core 2 Duo. It's behaved well enough that I don't see any reason to replace anything else anytime soon.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-09 12:00 am (UTC)The CPU I have is a Core2 Quad. I have 2x2GB of DDR2 1066 RAM, which was the big limitation; everyone's doing DDR3 these days.
Linux concerns are not a concern for this machine, it will probably never boot Linux except to maybe run a live CD for drive imaging or something.
The power supply is a Corsair 430 watt. I have the 400 watt predecessor in there now, and it's been a good CPU. For what I do 400 watts is more than enough; as I said, core2 quad, 2x2GB, one hard drive, one DVDROM and a nVidia 9500 dual-DVI video card which is a pretty basic dual-head card.