On Thu, 2008-04-17 at 17:31 +0100, Andrew Oakley wrote: > Farran Lee wrote: > > On Thu, 2008-04-17 at 17:06 +0100, andylockran wrote: > >> So how common is it? Have you had a motherboard die on you? > > not as far as I know - I'm only just getting to grips with the hardware > > side of computing. Is it obvious? Does the mb just not boot at all? > > The main problem with motherboard failure is that, unless they really > just don't boot at all, they're very difficult to spot. Typically I only > diagnose motherboard failure if I've swapped out everything else for > known-good spares, and still have a problem. To paraphrase Sherlock > Holmes, if I rule out everything else, then whatever's left must be the > problem. Really, though, I wonder if this is purely down to co-incidence > (did swapping over the motherboard cause me to firmly plug-in something > that wasn't firmly plugged in before?). > > Motherboards can fail in some surprisingly subtle ways, from the > anecdotes I've heard. If it Just Doesn't Boot then you're relatively > lucky, at least it's an easy case to RMA. With modern motherboards > having graphics, LAN and the kitchen sink onboard, whilst being ever > more cheap, I suppose the chance of failure is higher these days. > > My own good luck with motherboards may be down to the fact that I live > in a rural area with a less than reliable electricity supply (especially > during windy summer showers, when the leaves on the trees next to the > electricity cable have grown both bushy and damp). Ergo I always, always > use a UPS, so I never get spikes or dropouts, which are often the cause > of fried motherboards. > > I have a fifteen-year-old APC PowerUPS 650. I've replaced the battery > twice, and the onboard timer and battery charge meter died years ago, > but for your average power cut, It Just Works. I just set apcupsd to > shutdown gracefully after seven minutes on battery, and my hardware > rarely fails. Plus, I get enough juice to override the auto-shutdown and > continue working for half an hour if I need to. I also recommend > software RAID1 hard drive arrays for riding out that one moment (and > there is only ever one) when your nine-month-old daughter presses the > UPS-instant-off button (now obscured with a 5p and some masking tape). > > -- > Andrew Oakley > > >
hehe I swear my sister (9 YEARS) would do that if she didn't know I was doing coursework... I mentioned earlier that lots of people had problems with my model mb, and it still didn't work after RMA, so I might have to pick a different one. If I did, would I have to completely reinstall the system? Or would it just need certain fixes? =================================== Farran Lee I'm only 15 :P
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