This must have been the worst week in my life when it comes to hardware.
Last week, the day before NYE the motherboard on my home server blew up. To be honest that server had already been suffering a lot of downtime because of erratic crashes. So much so that I had put the server offline for a few months until I had the time to fix it. Looking back I think that the motherboard must have been the culprit all along. Too bad it had to explode on me just after I installed a brand new PSU. I installed that PSU and a new heat sink because I had suspected that part to be the root cause of the fault. I also installed a new GPU so I could use the machine with BOINC with the added benefit of GPU co-processing. And if needed I could use this machine at lab parties, as the case is much lighter then the case I use for the computer. After examining the motherboard, I came to the conclusion that some of the capacitors had burned though. They sure smelled like it! So when I had to pick a new motherboard, I had to make a choice. Would I pick the same brand and type, or would I switch? after some pondering, I chose to pick another motherboard. So bye bye Asrock, and hello ASUS. I just hope this one will serve me a bit longer than the last one.
At the same time that I was rebuilding this system, I was also in the process of upgrading the OS on the central computer of the house I live in. This computer is used by all the inhabitants to check their web-mail, look up recipes and listen to music while in the kitchen. I also wanted to use it for downloading stuff from Usenet. this required me to install a new HDD, as the old one was only 40 GiB, which would have been much too small to do any serious downloading. So I installed a 250GiB on which had been lying around for quite a while. After installing the disk I installed Ubuntu 11.10. This went very well and after about an hour and bit I had the system up and running again. I did think that it was a tad slow however. This prompted me to consider an upgrade to the old processor that was in the machine. After some consideration I decided that a new CPU would probably be a good thing, and I ordered an Athlon X2 4600 dual core CPU from a trader which specializes in old parts. It cost me more than I wanted to spend on it, but second hand these processors were not that much cheaper (at ca 35) and I could get a warranty on it. So I ordered the CPU and when I came I installed it. While I was at it, I also installed a new GPU that had become redundant from my other machine so that the graphics of the new Unity shell would run smoothly. Unfortunately the machine didn’t run very stably. At first I thought this was due to a memory overclock that I had applied with my previous CPU, so turned that down to stock settings. Unfortuantely it continued to crash until a day and a night later it wouldn’t boot anymore. BANG! it died on me. Whatever I tried, the computer wouldn’t get past POST anymore. So fater swapping some parts I came to the conclusion that I had blown up my CPU. Why? I really don’t know. the temperatures on the CPU weren’t all that high, and there really shouldn’t have been a reason for this to happen. I guess some parts arent made for my kind of ‘usage’.
Anyways, it has been a hell of a week in terms of computers. I did get very good at swapping parts in my compute though. At the end of the week i could totally trip a box and put it all together in under 45 minutes, something that I couldn’t do before. (maybe I was just too lazy)