[Gllug] Home desktop PC rebuild with Linux?

[Christopher Currie]

Many thanks to all those who replied..there are some helpful ideas there that 
I can follow up.

Tim clarke wrote:
>1000 miles from home,  and discovered the bloody thing won't boot at all, 
>hehe!
>Small amount of sweat ensued, lol
>Removal of the cmos battery cured that one fortunately!!

>Tim

My sentiments entirely. It's precisely because I have 20 years' experience, 
very intermittent and occasional, of repairing or trying to repair or upgrade 
my, and in one or two cases my employer's, microcomputers that I am very 
unwilling to try rebuilding one completely unless I can't avoid it! 

One thing I learnt was never to buy a replacement cmos or clock battery from 
Gultronics.

You learn your own weaknesses, and the fondness of the manufacturer of the 
badly-machined part, the supplier of the incorrect manual with drawings 
labelled only in Spratlyese, and the dealer with the wrong-sized hard-drive 
chassis, for homing in on them. Also that your vague memory of the job you 
did 18 months ago is completely useless as a help for the present one.

My average time for installing a single card on my PC (the present one has an 
easy-open case, not the old screws & bolts with inaccessible nuts) is between 
2 and 3 hours including putting all connectors together and testing. I can 
extrapolate from that to the time required for a full rebuild....

Still, it's not like fixing the old TRS-80 Model III, where getting the case 
off required slipping it sideways and then upwards, with only a few 
millimetres' tolerance and plenty of resistant friction, past the end of the 
CRT, which the manuals warned you would implode if you got it wrong...

I really admire people who are good at hardware fixes. They don't understand 
my admiration.

Christopher



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