technology

In one of my previous postings, I hinted at some of the issues I initially had with the Linux workstation at my new job (we use Redhat Enterprise 3.0). The UI was very sluggish, the memory usage high, I was unable to get Bluetooth support working, etc. Some of these issues have been resolved in the mean time, at least for the time being. Our home directories are on a network share, which adds significant overhead with desktop environments like Gnome that frequently need to access dot files in the user’s home directory....

For some reason it seems like I’m just not very lucky with computers right now… After my recent (and still somewhat ongoing) PC issues, my laptop gave up over the Thanksgiving weekend. This is a Compaq Presario R3000Z that is less than half a year old and that I’m otherwise extremely happy with. All of a sudden, the screen stopped working. Of course, I couldn’t resist taking the computer apart to see if this problem might have a simple cause, such as a disconnected cable....

After some research and comparison shopping, I decided to buy the following components to replace my defective motherboard: For the most part, I am very happy with this combination, although I still have some serious problems. Read below for more… ...

It turned out that it’s not the power supply. I guess I should have known, as the LEDs on the motherboard still light up. At this point it seems most likely that the motherboard is fried. This itself isn’t too bad, as my motherboard and processor are about 2 1/2 years old now and they weren’t exactly cutting edge back then. So I guess it’s time to get a new motherboard and processor....

This morning my PC’s video display suddenly shut down. When I tried to reboot it, it got through the initial boot sequence and died again right after it switched into graphics mode during the Windows startup. As I had similar problems with my previous ATI card, I wasn’t particularly surprised… I turned the PC off and decided to troubleshoot the problem after work. After I got back, I tried to start the PC again....