Wish it was always this easy (PC woes)

[mapsedge]

I was right: it was a hardware problem, specifically the video card.  I've never seen a capacitor "pop" before: there are seven on the card, the size of pencil erasers, and five of them blew their tops out.  Wow, guess that's a problem.

I have ordered a new card.  It ought to be here by Thursday: this one has a fan on-board, so as long as the power supply on my IBM can handle it (and I've no reason to think it can't) I should be back in business.

On to work.

Comments

[ladyniniane.livejournal.com]

Nvidia makes good stuff. I've used several of their cards over the years and really like them.

A new wireless router is in our future - this one is apparently having heat problems, and I am tired of being thrown offline at random moments...

[dr-pharmacist.livejournal.com]

I've had 2 nVidia PCIe cards pop Capacitors in the last three months...crazy!! They've either slackened on their manufacturing process lately, or something else is seriously wrong. But then again with the power capacity of the PCIe, more power = more prone to "pop". Both cards were purchased in the last 3 years or so. And both of them popped multiple capacitors when they went. One was because the onboard fan snapped it's housing and the card overheated. The other seemed to be perfectly functional. It was impressive.

I'm hoping to upgrade my M/B and CPU here before too long...I've been eying the C2Quad6600 and perhaps a 750i/780i chipset board. But for now that's wishful thinking *looks imploringly at the shriveled wallet*.

Enjoy the new video card!

[billthetailor.livejournal.com]

I've started dreaming about a new PC for home that I can use for video production: multi-core processor, multiple monitors (hey, why stop at two?), top out the memory, large SATA hard drives, etc etc etc. Biggest problem for video production is storage...a four or six terabyte DriveZilla would be reeeeeeeeeal nice.

[jehosefatz.livejournal.com]

One of my direct reports has been raving about Ubuntu Studio for a couple weeks -- he's doing animation/Blender related stuff but a lot of what you're describing is similar.

Normally I'd recommend WD 15K Raptors, but if you need size over speed there's no point.

- Jeho

[billthetailor.livejournal.com]

I had no idea about Ubuntu Studio. I recently installed Ubuntu (vanilla distro) on my sandbox pc and really like it: it mounted NTFS, shared (with Samba) no problem. My favorite editor (Notepad++) supposedly runs in Wine (though I haven't tried it yet). That there is an edition that includes all the other (and looks really nice, too!), I'll just have to try it.

[jehosefatz.livejournal.com]

In my gaming rig I run 2 512M XFX 8800GTs in SLI configuration. I love them. Pretty much always go nVidia chipset.

Bummer on the AGP though. I tend to like PCIExpress more. At least it's not ATI. Have had horrible luck with ATI cards.

My main bitch right now is that my gaming rig is a Windows box and XP SP2 (in any 32 bit flavor) chokes on my 8Gb (only recognizes 3Gb as addressable.) So, I'm probably going to upgrade to 64-bit Vista (because it's free and I don't rely on the gaming rig for anything even remotely resembling productivity... besides... "know your enemy" and all that Lao Tzu crap.)

- Jeho

Edit: corrected spelling mistakes.

[billthetailor.livejournal.com]

Yeah, AGP is all my motherboard supports. It also doesn't have a SATA port. Poor outdated little thing.

[iarraidh.livejournal.com]

In tech school we used to pop caps on purpose.
We called them "confetti generators".
Of course, those were bigger caps than PCB mount types.

[billthetailor.livejournal.com]

My brother went to Electronics Institute way back when (I think it was on Troost), so I've heard of using capacitors for ... purposes not in the original design spec. As in, "Hey John, catch!"

* my brother's name, incidentally, is John.

HAH

[iarraidh.livejournal.com]

Got that beat.
I went to EI when they were still at 6000 Independence Ave.

If you follow the Google street view, the building now says "AVE PLAZA". It was an old bowling alley converted into a school. They didn't have the money to move to troost until they got some gubment programs.

[duane-kc.livejournal.com]

Never seen a video card pop caps, but Gateway used to have a *bunch* of Pentium II MBs that did it all the damn time. My sympathies.