I’ve been struggling off and on with an issue on my Dad’s computer the last month or so. He said that it would occasionally just shut off completely out of the blue. (He also admonished me not to spend much time on it. Unfortunately problems like this are usually the ones that take the most time to solve because they seem random and it’s hard to pin down the cause.) He runs Windows XP primarily (although we have an ubuntu install setup as a dual boot choice.) In the last year the power supply and video card have been replaced for similar behavior. Although it’s been several months since the replacement with little “misbehaving” since. One of the things I did was run a memory test, which came out fine.
Tag: amd
-
Boot up freeze/sluggishness with ubuntu 6.06.1 install cd (on 64bit AMD hardware)
I thought I had written about this once before, but when I searched the site to find the solution I had come across before, I couldn’t find my post…. so, sorry if this is a duplication, but I’ve run into this on some AMD 64-bit based system boards. The most recent was based on the nvidia nforce4 chipset. Essentially in booting from either the alternative install cd or livecd for Ubuntu/kubuntu/edubuntu/xubuntu…. there is a freeze in the boot process. It goes for 30 seconds or more looking as though it’s hard frozen, but it does eventually manage to load the installer.
-
Strange Desktop issue resolved….
Well, it’s annoying to me when my own computer has issues that I can’t seem to track down and off and on for the last year I’ve had annoying seemingly random shut downs (I mean it’s as if someone pulled the power plug). It was an AMD XP 1800 system. The first I noticed the problem, I was trying to transcode video. A few minutes into the process – bang power off and it would be followed by a painfull 30 seconds of the system trying to post, shutting down, restarting, off, start, off, start with the floppy drive getting a seek every second or two as it seemed to try to muster the power to boot. For this reason, my first suspect was the power supply, 4 drives, hefty processor, hefty video card, (sound card, network, tv card, etc.etc.etc) maybe my generic 300 watt wasn’t steady enough?
-
AMD comes out on top in Dual Core CPU showdown
ZDnet has a showdown between AMD and Intel dual core processors. It looks as though AMD has won in every comparison. This is not the only good news for AMD lately as summarized here. Intel’s overwhelming dominance is not what it used to be.
-
VMWare’s free VMPlayer
One of the other things I had hoped to do this weekend was play around with the new VMWare player. VMware is a company that makes virtual machine software, the entry level pricing usually starting at $199 and going up from there. They’ve recently released a “Player” that can run preconfigured vmware system images. Which means a person can setup a system image in a file then zip it up and send to another person to run in their “player”.
-
$100 notebooks for schoolkids around the world likely will run linux
I was reading that Apple had offered free copies of OSX for the $100 laptop project aimed at bringing cheap laptops to schoolkids in the developing world and in some cases even here in the US. They don’t have the price down to $100 yet, but OSX was rejected because it isn’t open source, apparently the designers want an Open Source OS to work with so they can tweak and tinker with it.
-
Low power, small, wall mountable pc
This is something neat I found at the sunbeltblog. Usually I see spyware/security related bits there, but this was different and worth a mention. It appears to be a wall mountable pc around 4-5″ square.