garan.org

Bought myself an upgrade for my desktop last week as the old one has been locking up for no particular reason. Got an Asus Crosshair motherboard, not to be confused with the ATI Crossfire technology as this board runs the nVidia nForce 590 chipset with SLi capability. I've got an Athlon X2 Dual Core 4200+ processor to go in it and a pair of nVidia fanless 7900GS video cards. What I didn't realise was that I had DDR memory in my old rig and need DDR2 in the new one so I've had to purchase some new memory which I didn't want to do :(

I've got it all in my old PC case which has Acousti quiet, dust-proof fans thoughout (2 in and 2 exhausts) with a PSU that contains an intelligently controlled thermal circuit that controls the fan speed. The CPU cooler is a Zalman Super Aero Flower with an adjustable FanMate controller which along with the Samsung SpinPoint disks should all add up to very little on the noise front :)

Memory should be here tomorrow... Watch this space :)

I started having problems with my desktop PC last week. It was getting slow, sometimes hanging or rebooting itself with no apparant pattern. I tried a rebuild with both Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux and had problems with both. The CPU would go to 100% for no particular reason.

I tried re-seating cards and memory, pulling cards out to see if that helped but kept wondering about the hard drives. That particular part of the case was very warm to touch. So I've now removed the Raptor SATA drive that I was using as the Windows system disk and replaced it with a WD Caviar IDE drive. So far everything's looking a lot better.

At the moment the box is running Ubuntu AMD64 Linux. I managed to get both video cards working and all is looking well. But the AMD64 support is still in its infancy. So it's either get VmWare Workstation up and running with XP, rebuild the box on 32 bit Ubuntu which will improve matters but still need VmWare or just go back to running Windows (boo hiss!).