Joel has been battling computer problems, and so have I. The short version is that I now have a new motherboard and video card, and it cost me a week to get all of my peripherals to play nicely with each other once again. There’s still some lingering weirdness, but everything works.
The long version follows:
Day 0: Replaced IDE cable and added a second drive to my desktop PC. Wanted to use it as a “Raw Disk” for VMware because I’d noticed that my VM’d Linux install was running much faster than my physical Linux box.
Day 1: Desktop is experience hard-locks at random intervals, sometimes staying up for many hours but frequently crashing within a single hour. Restore everything to original condition, suspect motherboard damage during IDE cable swap.
Day 2: Tear down and clean case, install new motherboard. Spend rest of day trying to make system boot. Tip: don’t change chipsets on Windows XP, it will not automatically revert to generic IDE drivers, will not provide a useful error message, and worst of all, will not boot into safe mode.
Briefly considered using my Linux box as a temporary desktop, but the local X server was broken (or more likely, never worked in the first place). Finally discovered XP fix in Q312082, schedule Linux box for re-build.
Day 3: System stability is non-existant, assorted blue screens that mostly point to my Matrox G400 DualHead plus hard-locks whenever my WinTV PCR card is used.
Day 4: Buy GeForce 4 MX-440 DualHead card, blue screens vanish but WinTV still locks system. Disabling WinTV overlay does the trick but causes a severe performance penalty.
Day 5: Involve friend who works for TAG (PC support sweatshop). Install XP on a fresh disk, muck around with driver combinations, discover situation where overlay works but system remains unstable.
Day 6: Revert back to original installation. Notice FAQ about PCI latency timer, overlay works but stability sucks and WinTV recordings have extreme defects.
Day 7: Revert all chipset drivers to XP defaults. WinTV works well, no crashes since.
Day 8: Re-build Debian/Linux box, learn many things: default kernel sucks, you have to run lilo after updating lilo.conf, and hdparm is necessary for acceptable IDE performance. The 9x boost in transfer rates has wiped out the VMware performance advantage.
I’m still not completely happy with how things have settled with the new motherboard. No crashes in the past several days, but there’s some flakiness with my soundcard: it randomly stops working. Using an SB Live with the WinTV PVR is generally considered a bad idea, but… it always worked fine on the old motherboard.
Presently I’m thinking that the WinTV PVR needs to go, it’s always been a finicky beast. I think that my old G400 is fine, so I’m going to put it back in for a few days and see what happens. If there aren’t any crashes, I’ll take the GeForce back, get an ATI TV Wonder VE, and try running MythTV on the Linux box (I only need timed recordings, PVR features are gravy).
