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Hardware, software and computer suppliers (oh and errors, lots of those!)

A few months back at a meeting of the South Cheshire Linux Group someone said - I have this slightly dodgy PC Chips motherboard crashes sometimes - anyone want it?
It came with a case and a floppy (wow!) and I have a daughter needing a new computer for University so I said yes.


  • Needed a socket A so I bought one at CCL, booted - nothing, hmmm
  • Looked at the PSU and decided a new power supply wouldn't do any harm and bought one at Servicesure in Knutsford - still nothing, maybe it is the motherboard
  • Bought a motherboard in Novatech sale but it came with a DOA tag inside the box - so back it went
  • bought an ASUS motherboard and new memory from Microdirect, it then didn't have an on board graphics so I bought that card from Sapphire
  • still nothing
  • further inspection revealed a fried CPU (my stupidity at an early stage) so I bought a new one locally - Tim's megastore, at least they fitted it for me!
  • Ah it boots!
  • Installed mandrake 9.2 and it complained about being unable to install various packages, the spare disk it was using was tiny so I bought a new one back at CCL and a DVD player
  • Still an iffy install but I managed to scrape though by installing a minimum of packages
  • Wanted the NVIDIA graphics and therefore the kernel source, 9.2 hard to find so I thought we'll upgrade - BAD MOVE - it crashed when upgrading the kernel! Rebooted and had to 'install' 10.0 on top of 9.2 but did it and got a system with an interesting idea of what it thought was installed and a mangled rpm database
  • tried copying the kernel src rpm off cd onto hard drive - wouldn't install, tried another copy off USB dongle- same problem, looks as if the copied rpm on the hard drive is different to the one on the cd/USB dongle
  • light begins to dawn, disconnect floppy drive, problem goes away, but still got a trashed rpm database and a DVD I can't boot off!
  • how much does a floppy drive cost? It will probably end up with it being the cable...
  • Just need to finish the installation - when I get get everyone running Crack Attack off it!

So I have this slightly dodgy PC Chips motherboard.....

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