Odd machine behaviour

[Phil Dobbin]

On 12/08/2012 05:19 PM, compdoc wrote:

>> If I ever get the chance (or am desperate) I'll re-format 
>> & re-label the old drive & see how it goes.
> 
> I have built (still do) a lot of pcs using Athlons, and those older machines
> can still do good work - it just takes a little longer. One of the things
> that slowed them down was the speed of the hard drives made back then. 
> 
> Technology has advanced a lot since. If your machine has sata ports, you can
> make the computer run quite fast just by installing an ssd drive. Of course
> a decent amount of ram helps too.
> 
> By the way, be sure to visually inspect the capacitors on the mainboard, and
> have your electronics guy check the caps in the PSU. Many systems
> crash/freeze/die from failed capacitors. More so with older systems, but it
> still happens with systems sold within the last year or two. 

Thanks for the advice. Duly noted.

As a postscript to this saga, I fitted a healthy hard drive & attempted
to install Lubuntu 12.10 32-bit which had in the past attempted to
install but failed due to disk errors on the old, knackered drive. This
time, however, using the same disk, the machine refused to boot from it
full stop. I then booted from an Ubuntu 12.04 Live CD (also 32-bit) &
all was great. Really snappy for a Live CD but again, no dice on the
install. On the three occasions that I tried, the installer simply
vanished after I entered my username & password & returned me to the
Live CD.

So, I dug out the net install of Wheezy that I'd originally used to
install before the old drive packed up & it installed without a hiccup &
is now running along quite happily as one would expect (I didn't bother
to try either Fedora or CentOS; I've got enough of those distros at the
moment).

So, all in all, quite odd. Maybe the AMD didn't like Ubuntu but it seems
strange. Could be just Unity it barfed at.

Anyway, I gave the innards a good going over (blew out any detritus,
checked all connections, etc) & the disk I put in was in good health so
we'll see how it gets on.

Cheers,

  Phil...

-- 
currently (ab)using
CentOS 5.8 & 6.3, Debian Squeeze & Wheezy, Fedora Beefy & Spherical,
Lubuntu 12.10, OS X Snow Leopard & Ubuntu Precise & Quantal