[ubuntu-uk] Motherboards dying ( was:Re: possible to install ubuntu like gentoo?)

[Farran Lee]

On Thu, 2008-04-17 at 17:31 +0100, Andrew Oakley wrote:

> Farran Lee wrote:
> > On Thu, 2008-04-17 at 17:06 +0100, andylockran wrote:
> >> So how common is it?  Have you had a motherboard die on you?
> > not as far as I know - I'm only just getting to grips with the hardware 
> > side of computing. Is it obvious? Does the mb just not boot at all?
> 
> The main problem with motherboard failure is that, unless they really 
> just don't boot at all, they're very difficult to spot. Typically I only 
> diagnose motherboard failure if I've swapped out everything else for 
> known-good spares, and still have a problem. To paraphrase Sherlock 
> Holmes, if I rule out everything else, then whatever's left must be the 
> problem. Really, though, I wonder if this is purely down to co-incidence 
> (did swapping over the motherboard cause me to firmly plug-in something 
> that wasn't firmly plugged in before?).
> 
> Motherboards can fail in some surprisingly subtle ways, from the 
> anecdotes I've heard. If it Just Doesn't Boot then you're relatively 
> lucky, at least it's an easy case to RMA. With modern motherboards 
> having graphics, LAN and the kitchen sink onboard, whilst being ever 
> more cheap, I suppose the chance of failure is higher these days.
> 
> My own good luck with motherboards may be down to the fact that I live 
> in a rural area with a less than reliable electricity supply (especially 
> during windy summer showers, when the leaves on the trees next to the 
> electricity cable have grown both bushy and damp). Ergo I always, always 
> use a UPS, so I never get spikes or dropouts, which are often the cause 
> of fried motherboards.
> 
> I have a fifteen-year-old APC PowerUPS 650. I've replaced the battery 
> twice, and the onboard timer and battery charge meter died years ago, 
> but for your average power cut, It Just Works. I just set apcupsd to 
> shutdown gracefully after seven minutes on battery, and my hardware 
> rarely fails. Plus, I get enough juice to override the auto-shutdown and 
> continue working for half an hour if I need to. I also recommend 
> software RAID1 hard drive arrays for riding out that one moment (and 
> there is only ever one) when your nine-month-old daughter presses the 
> UPS-instant-off button (now obscured with a 5p and some masking tape).
> 
> -- 
> Andrew Oakley
> 
> 
> 

hehe
I swear my sister (9 YEARS) would do that if she didn't know I was doing
coursework...

I mentioned earlier that lots of people had problems with my model mb,
and it still didn't work after RMA, so I might have to pick a different
one. If I did, would I have to completely reinstall the system? Or would
it just need certain fixes?

===================================
Farran Lee
I'm only 15 :P
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