[ale] similar weirdness

[Sean Kilpatrick]

On Thursday 31 May 2007 13:02, Warren Myers wrote:
| what window manager are you running, and which distro?

Running straight KDE on an FC-3 box, which appears to have a
dieing mobo. 

I sent the following letter to ALE earlier this morning, but
apparently it never got there.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

subject:  mobo question

According to the manual, my ASUS A7N266-VM mobo was made in March, 2002.

Of late it has been having problems finding the BIOS chip and data on
startup.  (It sometimes stalls for 30 seconds, sometimes for 120 seconds.

Yesterday evening, after being away for more than two weeks, I turned on
the computer and cleared out the email queue. Then I shut off the monitor
but left the computer on (usual practice).  This morning the computer would
not display anything on the monitor (normally any input from the mouse or
the keyboard brings up the desktop).  I had to do a hard shutdown.

Ouch.

I'm thinking this mobo is not long for this world.

So I could use some suggestions for a new mobo.

I don't need the latest cutting edge.  I believe that any new mobo is going
to assume SATA drives.  I am running a two drive software RAID on IDE drives
now.  Can a new mobo handle the older drives so I can just plug them in and
keep going (this assumes Nvidia video) or am I doomed to a clean install of
everything on new drives? Creating a new backup of /home on a USB external
drive is trivial.

Related question:  assuming I stay with FC, what are the advantages/gotchas
of 32/64-bit chips?

Or do I just give up, buy an all-knew machine, install Linux and wait for
the next Install Fest to get RAID up and running?

Sean