power supply and motherboard expired

[Larry Grover]

squareyes wrote:
> Hi,
> thanks Hans and Larry,
> 
> ----- > Out of curiosity, how did you determine that both powersupply and
> 
>>motherboard are bad?  Are you sure you didn't just lose the powersupply?
> 
> 
> Installed a new power supply, only action was power supply noise, no
> video action, so tried another video card, same, then noticed condensers
> on board very swollen, possibly a power surge. Have all fingers crossed
> that nothing else has expired, can't afford a new machine.

Ah, I see.  I asked because, at least in my limited experience, the 
power supply is much more likely to fail than the motherboard.  In the 
last year or so, I've had a rash of bad power supplies, but none of 
them have caused damage to other components.  Swollen caps on the 
mother board sound bad, though.

Well, what ever happened, I hope it didn't take down your hard drive, too.

-snip-

>>Even if you have a different chipset on your new motherboard, the
>>kernel + hotplug should detect your new hardware correctly and load
>>the right modules.
> 
> 
> Sounds like very good news, nothing earth shattering on the old drive
> but will take a while to find the tutorials (Url's) and email addresses
> again

Replacing the power supply and mother board should be straightforward. 
  I've done this several times, upgrading systems (new motherboard + 
cpu).  As long as you stay in the same processor family (686 to 686, 
or athlon to athlon, etc), you should be fine just connecting your old 
drive to the new mother board.  In fact, if your old drive has a 386 
kernel on it, it will probably boot any x86 processor.

Regards,
Larry