My wife's computer has decided to give up the ghost. Very much the same as mine did last year. It keeps crashing for no reason, blue screening and just refusing to work. Which leads me to beleive that it is either the mother board or the processor that have died.
So I had to buy a new motherboard, a new processor, and because of the change of board, new memory! All in a ll, it has cost me just under £100 which is not too bad really.
Her computer will be much better now, and will run at 1.53 ghz compared to my 1.72 ghz. Going to need to get her a bit more memory, and a 128mb graphics card to make it decent enough to last more than a year.
Andrew and Richard are due down in a couple of weeks too, so I am looking forward to that, and we have decided that we are going to have a family holiday next year and go to Download Festival. I think we should go onto Holiday Showdown. :D
Laters
Alley Katt
e-mail: mondrak@dsl.pipex.com
webby: http://www.mondrak.dsl.pipex.com
Quote of the day: Insanity doesn't run in my family. It practically gallops.
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Sorry to hear of the PC problems, it's always annoying when something goes wrong.
The first thing I do now with a misbehaving box is to unplug and plug everything back into the motherboard one-by-one, except the CPU, to rule out the possibility of a bad connection. Cards, memory modules, drive cables etc can work their way lose over time causing all manner of odd crashes.
After that I leave MemTest86 running overnight on a continuous loop to verify that it isn't a dodgy memory stick. CPUs don't often fail unless mistreated, but memory is less reliable. The great thing about MemTest86 is that it comes as a bootable CD ISO image you make your own CD from, so you don't need an O/S installed (or even a hard-drive for that matter) to use it. Just ensure the first boot devoce is the CD-ROM and it'll launch as soon as the machine has POSTed. I'd recommend using MemTest86 not just on malfunctioning machines but also on any new machine or after a memory upgrade as a matter of course to rule out all too common less than perfect modules.
I assume your wife is a gamer or does 3D rendering then, as a better gfx-card with more memory will have negligible effect otherwise. That will change when Windows Longhorn is introduced, but that won't be until the end of 2006 at the earliest, and the rate of development in graphics cards means that a card which costs say £150 now will cost more like £50 then.
Good news on the memory front is prices are very cheap at the moment, they've been falling since the new year and DDR prices are now about as low as they're likely to get I think. £30 for a 512MB stick of Corsair PC3200 CAS2.5 from Dabs is a steal, in fact I've been intending to post about it and advising anyone who might intend to buy memory to do so now as prices could climb again given how the market is very volatile (they haven't moved much for several weeks and one or two prices have actually edged up slightly).
Good luck with the new box.
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