Completed a little computer project I have been fooling around with over the last few weeks. Benjamin's Dell laptop (an old 8100 from a previous job), suddenly stopped booting. I think the mainboard is fried, a recurring problem with these models, I understand. At the same time, Dominick has started asking for a faster system. He currently has a Dell 1100 laptop, which works fine but not really fit for gaming, which appears to be his main interest for some reason! I told him to look in the basement in the "PC Graveyard" where we have some old desktops and parts boxed up. He found a PII 450 Mhz system with aDVD player in it and a couple of hard drives and old ISA VGA card and got a system all put together.

At this point, I jumped in and helped download Mandrake 10.2 Linux and burned boot/install CD"s for him. We got it installed okay, but couldn't get the D-link 120 usb wireless adapter to go. I left it for a couple of weeks, before deciding to give it another go. After much research and poking around, I determined the chip-set in the adapter, found an open source version of a driver, got it downloaded, and eventually compiled and running. I did need to do some Makefile script noodling, find a copy of the kernel source, and update some of the driver source that appeared to be out of date against the kernel, but in the end it was online and Benjamin was able to get on Runescape.

The next problem was the Gnome desktop was REALLY slow. So I ordered a new motherboard with an AMD Sempron 2500+ and 256Meg DDR DRAM. This weekend I put it all together.

The first issue was that the old ISA VGA card was not going to work on this board. I called Jeanne who happened to be at a mall nearby, to grab a video card for me - whatever she could find. She came home with an ATI Radeon 9550 Gamer edition (110CHF). I successfully got everything swapped out and the new stuff plugged in, but the system would not power-up for more than 5-10 seconds.

I figured the 250W power supply was not enough for the AMD chip, and the ATI card, and the two hard-drives, so I ran off to a small shop in France that my friend Emmanuel brought me to and bought a new 400W PSU (35Euro). After plugging it in, the problem was not fixed, which was very frustrating and depressing.

After more reading and researching, I decided it was not a power issue but that the CPU Overheat Protection was causing it to power off. I took off the CPU cooler and checked the chip and it was not hot, but I did notice that I had it on the wrong way around so the thermal material was not flush to the chip core. After turning it around, everything came up fine.

The new machine is now a screamer. It cost me around $300 for the upgrade, which was about double what I thought I could get away with.

We'll see how long the Linux experiment works. As I said, Ben can play Runescape, which is the big deal this summer. When school starts he has Open Office for homework. With the DVD player, he can play DVD's and use the system as a home theater (just what he needs in his bed room), and I loaded Skype so he has free international phone calls to his buddies in the US that are on Skype.

After all that work, it's time to spend some time outdoors. We are off for a walk in the Alps...photos to follow...JP