[Sussex] Scary PC fry-up

[Gavin Stevens]

Hi all,

Just got back online after my old PC went from being trusty & reliable to a gibbering wreck in 5 days.

First sign of trouble was the HDD not spinning up quickly enough to get recognised by the BIOS, so I got a new HDD, installed it as a new master, jumpered the old one to slave. From that moment on, the PC wouldn't recognise anything apart from the RAM & the FD. After 3 days checking for every conceivable stupidity that I might have committed (jumpers, connections, etc. etc.), I had to conclude that it wasn't ever coming back.

I got the bits for a new machine from work & built it, & put the old HDD in the new machine as slave & fortunately it is still spinning & I have now retrieved all my data.

It did mean that I had to install Debian from scratch & I decided to give KDE a try - so far so good.

So the outcome is happy & I've made a technological leap from an AMD K6 300 MHz CPU / 5.2 GB HDD / 128 MB RAM to a Pentium 4 2.8 GHz CPU / 80 GB HDD / 512 MB RAM.

It's good to be back.

Gavin.

BTW: I sounded my partner out about coming to a moot & she seemed quite happy with the idea... so maybe I shall be able to get to one soon.