Mother Board Stew

2004 Dec 1 at 04:22 » Tagged as :motherboard, rcs,

It's been two weeks since my last post, I have been down with indigestion caused by Mother Board Stew.

Immidiately After I completed my migration from Red Hat 9 to Fedora Core, one of the three hard disks on my computer fell criticially ill and died. All that whirring about while Fedora was being installed proved too much for. The death of the hard disk was no great loss but the time lost in installing Fedora Core several times proved to be too much and I had to spend a lot of my time with other work just to catch up with the back log.

It turned out that the hard disk failure was caused by a mother board problem. In March I wrote about a suspected toast CPU and I have encountered other niggling problems like spontanous restarts the real culprit as it now turns out is the Mother Board.

Nearly an year ago, me and a friend both purchased Gigabyte ----- motherboards and set up nearly identical systems. Geeks in Sri Lanka are in the habit of setting up their own machines, this may be true everywhere but in Sri Lanka we have an added incentive because branded machines are twice as costly. You find many computer shops selling cheap unbranded machines but walking into one of these shops feels like walking into a used car dealership.

My friends mother board lasted less than 3 months the vendor did replace it but it died once again and took his CPU along with it to silicon heaven. In my case after the hard disk burn out, I plugged in a new one but the MB absolutely refuse to detect it. To be precise the IDE controller refused to work with four devices (3 Hard Disks, 1 CD Writer) at the same time. It was then that I finally concluded that the mother board was stewed.

I have been using AMD processors for a long long time, over the last few years I have been through a K6-II, K6-III, Athlon and now an Athlon XP. All four had to be discarded before their time was up because the mother boards were toasted. Thus for a change I decided to try an Intel primarily because Intel makes it's own boards. So for the first time since working on a Pentium 166 many many years ago, I now have another Intel chip ticking away inside my computer.