Sorry this will be long, but here's my story. I think my machine's specs are in my sig.
The build will be 4 years old in September. I usually get a new machine every 3 years, so I am in fact overdue but wanted to get some more life out of this one.
I've been having OS and hard drive trouble since around March. I've gone from XP to a Windows 7 beta to Vista. I figured out that the booting trouble I was having with Windows 7 was due to a bad hard drive (or at least a screwy partition table). I was able to save about 2/3 of my data, but I think that drive may be toast.
(If any of this seems confusing -- I keep my data on a separate physical drive from the drive with my OS. That way, if my OS gets corrupt at least I have my data. I've been doing this for quite some time. Ironically, it turned out that the drive with the data was the one that went bad this time).
So, to save my data I had to install Vista (Win 7 beta expired). I decided I'd had it with Windows (again). I bought a new hard drive. I was very proficient with Linux about 4 years ago, only giving it up because I was using a lot of Windows applications for audio and video processing that just didn't work right in Linux. I recently decided I was going back to Linux for good.
While installing the new hard drive, I literally took the machine apart. My main reason for doing so was that the northbridge fan was hideously loud. I removed the mobo, removed the NB fan and cleaned it and oiled it. To do this, obviously I pretty much had to take the whole machine apart. I went through an entire can of air cleaning out the PC (and it was filthy in there!) I reassembled carefully.
Incidentally, my efforts at silencing the fan were to no avail. I read somewhere on the net that if I wasn't overclocking (and I'm not) I could pretty much just unplug the thing. It was *really* noisy, so that's what I did.
I installed Fedora on the new drive and used my BIOS's boot menu to choose which OS I wanted to use. Everything was sailing along great until ... I was reading a PDF file in Linux when it just froze completely. I thought "Linux freeze up? No way!" I shut the machine down by holding the power button, but upon turning it back on, it will now not even POST. The indicator light on the monitor won't even light up -- like it's not even getting any signal.
I've flipped the BIOS reset jumper on the mobo, and I've also swapped out the video card. Still nothing. Not even a beep.
So, advice? Does anyone think it's possible that the northbridge could have overheated in so short a time?
It is not my intention to start a PC vs. Mac thread here, but I have been giving serious consideration to just buying a danged iMac. We have a tax-free weekend coming up here in North Carolina in a couple of weeks. I feel like I'm getting too old and too busy with my job to be spending so much time messing about with PC parts. I just need something that will work!
The build will be 4 years old in September. I usually get a new machine every 3 years, so I am in fact overdue but wanted to get some more life out of this one.
I've been having OS and hard drive trouble since around March. I've gone from XP to a Windows 7 beta to Vista. I figured out that the booting trouble I was having with Windows 7 was due to a bad hard drive (or at least a screwy partition table). I was able to save about 2/3 of my data, but I think that drive may be toast.
(If any of this seems confusing -- I keep my data on a separate physical drive from the drive with my OS. That way, if my OS gets corrupt at least I have my data. I've been doing this for quite some time. Ironically, it turned out that the drive with the data was the one that went bad this time).
So, to save my data I had to install Vista (Win 7 beta expired). I decided I'd had it with Windows (again). I bought a new hard drive. I was very proficient with Linux about 4 years ago, only giving it up because I was using a lot of Windows applications for audio and video processing that just didn't work right in Linux. I recently decided I was going back to Linux for good.
While installing the new hard drive, I literally took the machine apart. My main reason for doing so was that the northbridge fan was hideously loud. I removed the mobo, removed the NB fan and cleaned it and oiled it. To do this, obviously I pretty much had to take the whole machine apart. I went through an entire can of air cleaning out the PC (and it was filthy in there!) I reassembled carefully.
Incidentally, my efforts at silencing the fan were to no avail. I read somewhere on the net that if I wasn't overclocking (and I'm not) I could pretty much just unplug the thing. It was *really* noisy, so that's what I did.
I installed Fedora on the new drive and used my BIOS's boot menu to choose which OS I wanted to use. Everything was sailing along great until ... I was reading a PDF file in Linux when it just froze completely. I thought "Linux freeze up? No way!" I shut the machine down by holding the power button, but upon turning it back on, it will now not even POST. The indicator light on the monitor won't even light up -- like it's not even getting any signal.
I've flipped the BIOS reset jumper on the mobo, and I've also swapped out the video card. Still nothing. Not even a beep.
So, advice? Does anyone think it's possible that the northbridge could have overheated in so short a time?
It is not my intention to start a PC vs. Mac thread here, but I have been giving serious consideration to just buying a danged iMac. We have a tax-free weekend coming up here in North Carolina in a couple of weeks. I feel like I'm getting too old and too busy with my job to be spending so much time messing about with PC parts. I just need something that will work!
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