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One of the computers I rescued from the bin has always acted a bit squirrely: slow booting, weird errors when booting, occasional lock ups. At first I thought it was the motherboard not liking Linux much. Some distributions of Linux won't work with odd or custom motherboards and I tried several distros to get it to run. Then I thought the it was the BIOS battery dying and a new battery and reset of the BIOS seemed to help.
Then it just locked up and refused to even go into a BIOS screen. Eh, not good. After careful diagnostics - removing one thing at a time from the motherboard until I was down to just the motherboard, CPU and RAM - I discovered that I had at least one bad stick of RAM. Fortunately, I had spare RAM and it seems much happier now.
The machine was not in normal use: I was using it to digitize old cassette tapes of out of print or recorded live music from some science fiction cons I went to many years ago. Pro tip: *don't* use the built in audio chip on the mother board. Use a dedicated audio card. Even a Sound Blaster type board will do a better job than the motherboard audio chip.
-m
Then it just locked up and refused to even go into a BIOS screen. Eh, not good. After careful diagnostics - removing one thing at a time from the motherboard until I was down to just the motherboard, CPU and RAM - I discovered that I had at least one bad stick of RAM. Fortunately, I had spare RAM and it seems much happier now.
The machine was not in normal use: I was using it to digitize old cassette tapes of out of print or recorded live music from some science fiction cons I went to many years ago. Pro tip: *don't* use the built in audio chip on the mother board. Use a dedicated audio card. Even a Sound Blaster type board will do a better job than the motherboard audio chip.
-m
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