[SC.LUG] Hardware, software and computer suppliers (oh and errors, lots of those!)

[Robert Marshall]

Don't know if Matthew is still on this list(is anyone on this list?)
but I thought others might enjoy this tale of woe and share in some
schadenfreude!

A few months back at a meeting of the South Cheshire Linux Group
someone said - I have this slightly dodgy PC Chips motherboard crashes
sometimes - anyone want it?
It came with a case and a floppy (wow!) so I said yes.


    * Needed a socket A so I bought one at CCL, booted - nothing, hmmm
    * Looked at the PSU and decided a new power supply wouldn't do any
      harm and bought one at Servicesure in Knutsford - still nothing,
      maybe it is the motherboard
    * Bought a motherboard in Novatech sale but it came with a DOA tag
      inside the box - so back it went
    * bought a motherboard and new memory from Microdirect, it then
      didn't have an on board graphics so I bought that card from
      Sapphire
    * still nothing
    * further inspection revealed a fried CPU (my stupidity at an
      early stage) so I bought a new one locally - Tim's megastore at
      least they fitted it for me!
    * Ah it boots!
    * Installed mandrake 9.2 and it complained about being unable to
      install various packages, the spare disk it was using was tiny
      so I bought a new one back at CCL and a DVD player
    * Still an iffy install but I managed to scrape though by
      installing a minimum
    * Wanted the NVIDIA graphics and therefore the kernel source, 9.2
      hard to find so I thought we'll upgrade - BAD MOVE - it crashed
      when upgrading the kernel! Rebooted and had to 'install' 10.0 on
      top of 9.2 but did it and got a system with an interesting idea
      of what it thought was installed and a mangled rpm database
    * tried coping the kernel src rpm off cd onto hard drive -
      wouldn't install, tried another copy off USB dongle- same
      problem
    * light begins to dawn, disconnect floppy drive, problem goes
      away, but still got a trashed rpm database and a DVD I can't
      boot off!
    * how much does a floppy drive cost?


So I have this slightly dodgy PC Chips motherboard.....

Robert
-- 
Home m/c on the web at http://brock-marshall.no-ip.info/~robert/ -
when it's booted! and has the above with supplier links!!