Well, I feel dumb...

[Weston]

I've been running an Athlon 600 with 512mb of *gasp* PC100 RAM for the past 4 years now, and it works just fine, except for some slowness when editting or encoding video (under Windows, of course). Last night, I was on HAI when it froze up and would not restart. It just acted dead when I turned the power on, so I figured the mobo or CPU was dead...

I went to PC Club today and spent around $260 on an Athlon XP 2200+ mobo/cpu, ram, and case. It was a great deal, imo, and has all kinds of stuff integrated (video, audio, 10/100 ethernet, assloads of USB ports, etc). But then I went home and put it together to find that it does the same damn thing... I hit the power and nothing happens. So I started removing stuff and trying it again. It turns out that my TV tuner card just went to shit and disabled the rest of the system.

So, I could have just simply removed the card and everything would have been fine, but I have this disease that causes me to needlessly spend money. I guess at least I have a spare system that I have little to no use for. Now to figure out a use for it... I'm sure to waste more money...

[Kwando]

HAHA Nice trouble shooting!

[Mario]

That is troubleshooting at it's peak finest right there, good job! :)

[john]

Well, it was time to upgrade your box anyway. Make a linux box out of the older system. :)

[stu]

God, what an IDIOT! I'd erase this before it's linked to every computer forum in the world.

[Weston]

Well, it's not quite as bad as it sounds... the old mobo was already a little messed up (freak PSU fire a few years ago), so that's why I figured it just finally died. My troubleshooting skills aren't normally that bad. ;)

[BluByU]

I had to reinstall windows because my old PC was shit and crashed because of my bluetooth adapter. I have no clue what the hell happened with you, but at least you didn't lose tons of important emails. Oh yeah I'll even give you back your hamburgers now.

[forum]

Weston I think john was right, it does sound like it's time for a new one anyways. At least the troubleshooting worked the second time around

Alex: Thats because win98 has shit for usb support, but ya know, you are new so it's ok, there is a reason it worked a whole lot better on your new one :)

[DrJones]

If people have older PCs (sub 1000 MHz) they like to get rid of for cheap I'll give them a nice home. It's a well secure enviroment where they won't be forced to work too hard, and will have lots of siblings to chat and play with.

[Weston-work]

But I had no real reason to upgrade... The Athlon 600 has been doing fine for the last 4 years. The only time it was ever slow for me was when encoding video, but it still wasn't bad. 600MHz was more than enough to post whore and write a few apps. I guess at least it will be good for games, even though I almost never play them.

[exciv2000]

If people have older PCs (sub 1000 MHz) they like to get rid of for cheap I'll give them a nice home. It's a well secure enviroment where they won't be forced to work too hard, and will have lots of siblings to chat and play with.

see my forsale post, I've got two of them if you want/need them.

[Weston-work]

If anyone cares, I've decided to stick the old PC in the living room and hook it up to my TV... I'm adding a small hard drive, wireless trackball, and 802.11b interface. It'll be nice to be able to play mp3s and various videos in there (*cough*divx rips*cough*)...

[forum]

http://www.highaltitudeimports.com/showthread.php?t=15476&highlight=htpc

nice to have on the rare occasion we use it though

edit: dead pics suck though

[Weston]

Yeah, I figure I wont use it much, except for when people come over, but it will be a project to keep me entertained for a few days. I'm tempted to run Win98, just for the WMV3 compatibility (the one big format that Linux doesn't support yet). Or, if I get another TV tuner card and run Linux, I could get rid of the TiVo and then I'd be able to drop Qwest's pathetic ass... $13/mo for TiVo + $25/mo for phone + $11/mo for dial-up ISP = $49/mo total that would be much better spent on a cable ISP.