Off Topic: Hardware

[Alan E. Davis]

This is certainly off topic; however, I was running Ubuntu when this
happened, and perhaps some of the symptoms will be more familiar with a user
of Ubuntu. I have started to have serious problems with my system,
presumeably with my Matrox G450 card. [Interestingly, when these problems
were manifesting, Ubuntu was the easiest to install, because the
installation used dialog, a textmode facility! This is worth something!] A
caveat: this is a venerable workhorse machine which I have rebuilt and kept
running in stages over many years.

First Symptom: suddenly, only 800x600 and 640x480 modes are available: I was
using 1600x1200 previously. X wouldn't use any other modes.

Second Symptom: Vertical white lines appeared, separating the visual content
into stripes about 5-6mm wide. The lines were quite narrow.

Third Symptom: When I panicked and reinstalled, the installation wouldn't
complete itself, balked part way through, after configuring partitions.

This video card has shown signs of various kinds over the past two years.
When I cleaned the contacts and sometimes flex the card the card will work,
until the machine is moved or some wires bumped. At these times that symptom
is lack of signal to the monitor.

Today, I finally cleaned the contacts two or three times. Eventually blew
out dust from the AGP slot with compressed gas. Also pulled the RAM, cleaned
it and reinstalled two or three times, then used compressed gas to blow the
dust away from the slot. It seemed that after the dust-removal step, the
system cohered enough to install Ubuntu again.

The installation came up only in 800x600 and 640x480 modes. My choice.

There certainly are enough confounding variables to warn off any attempt to
put these symptoms down to a single cause, not the least that this machine
is old and buggy. I am curious about the loss of video function and what
hardware problems might have caused this.

Thanks for reading this.

Alan Davis

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