Journal shadowbearer's Journal: RIP, oh faithful friend 4
My Chaintech AIV5 motherboard died explosively Friday night - two caps on the back of the mobo vomited all over the board. We were sitting around listening to music when there was a loud POP and the machine went down completely.
An hour later, after swapping parts around - and pulling the board and looking at the mess
That mobo - the chaintech - cost me $85 in '01; and it gave me nearly three years of 24/7 service, with no problems whatsoever (I'm not going to talk about the two times I dealt with Chaintech's phone tech support, I nearly went postal
Now I have no backup motherboards for this system left - I sold the others I had when I moved here 15 months ago. So I'm wondering where to go from here. I'd like to upgrade to an Athlon64 system, but that involves replacing a lot more than the motherboard.
I do need to have a "moments-notice" backup board here, one that I could swap out easily with this one if necessary. It has to be linux friendly, and it has to be cheap - money is tight right now, and if I'm going to upgrade to a '64 system this fall, I have to get by as cheap as possible in buying a backup mobo. Does anyone have any suggestions? It's a Duron system with 133mhz ram, and I do like the Via chipset, it's a no problem sort for me, regardless of what others say.
While I'm on the topic, I'd love to hear some opinions on what the best route would be for '64 upgrades. I run Gentoo and the latest linux kernels; my only real requirements for a 64 board would be linux/stability, at least 5 PCI slots and upgradability. And cheap, um, inexpensive. A hundred - hundred fifty bucks, tops.
(I can live with 3 PCI slots if cmi or ac97 sound and something as nice as the 8139 nic chipset is onboard). Raid would be nice, but it's not really needed; I know that SATA is becoming common on many of the boards, but I don't have any experience with it and likely won't need it for a while, tho it'd be nice to have for upgrade purposes when I feel like it. Seems like the SATA hardrives are becoming cheaper than the old UDMA IDE ones. Go figure
I've been perusing reviews and such of the latest boards, but they tell me little about what user experiences - particularly under linux - are like. Any links would be appreciated, I just don't have time to do the kind of exhaustive research that I used to
I don't know if anyone even watches my journal anymore... lol.
Cheers to all my friends; and if you were wondering where I've been the last few weeks, well, an old lady friend has re-entered my life, and we've been catching up. It's not love, but comfortable and very deep friendship going back 15 years. I have to say, this place doesn't look like the typical bachelor pad anymore
Oh, and I converted from fluxbox to Enlightenment this weekend. I played with E some years ago, wasn't impressed. Now I am very impressed. VERY impressed, enough so that I spent most of the day today customizing E to my preferences. Sure has matured, and kudos to the dev teams at Enlightenment.org!! I'm seriously considering joining the team as a documentation grammar nazi - editing is something I'm very good at - they are unusually good at writing docs, but I still cringe every few paragraphs.
I could go on and on and on, but I'm going to cut this short.
Oh, and Hi everyone. Sorry it's been so long...
SB
well howdy... (Score:1)
No idea what to recommend, my budget, I stay on the raw dripping bleeding edge of 6 year old technology. Wait, I just re did my math, EIGHT years old. I'm on a 1996 IBM right now, a 200PP processor. It's sock rolid as they say. Runs FC2 perfectly fine. I've changed to dual hdds (keep my swap on one), added some ram, and changed
Re:well howdy... (Score:2)
yup. Funny to think of all the hardware I threw out when I moved... if I had known you then, I would've shipped you the whole lot, you'd have loved it, really
On the other hand, I bought a HP Vectra 233Mhz desktop box on Ebay a few weeks back for $15 + $30 shipping; after an initial snafu where they shipped me the wrong item (corrected within a few days and overnight shipped, they lost money on tha
Re:well howdy... (Score:2)
Re:well howdy... (Score:1)