Yup, it’s back in the shop. I never did get the !@#$-er to work and I don’t think they will either. My attempts include: Taking out the ATA card. Replacing the graphics card. Turning off hyperthreading. Turning off the onboard ethernet and putting in my old ethernet card. Running the virus checker every night. Running chkdsk several times. Spending about $20 on the Radeon support line finding out that they don’t know nuthin’. Contacting ASUS and being told that it could be lots of things. Nevertheless, all day long it’s gotten worse and worse, crashing to a re-start at closer and closer intervals. You’d almost think it was a heat thing except the motherboard monitor says it’s a cool 90F in there.

So, I’m thinking about my alternatives. I spent a chunk of money on the new mobo, RAM and case. I don’t know that the store will take it back since it seems to work when they take my drives out so it seems to have something to do with my software. (After a clean install of XP and with only Office XP added, it was still crashing.) So, I may have a major piece of metal on my hands. Suppose I were to try linux on it? (I forgot to try booting up knoppix before I dropped it off at the PC shop. Damn!)

I do need Windows for a few reasons. First, I want to know what the rest of the world is experiencing (=suffering). Second, there are some business docs that I work with that use Office features that Star Office doesn’t offer. Third, I play games. So, maybe I take my high-end graphics card out of my current machine and replace it with something simpler. I build a new new machine, not as high-end, to run games and Office and Quicken. I use the current new machine as my daily linux box, even though the new machine is way over-spec’ed for linux.

Hmm.

Categories: Uncategorized dw