Tribal Instinct

So last night there was a power outage on my block of the school campus. I get up this morning to a nonfunctional computer. I am posting this from work. I have been fucking around with it all day and I know of at least two things wrong with it: motherboard is fried, or the processor is fried. Hopefully not both, although it is a Socket A (462) board with an AMD Athlon XP 2700+ so either way I will probably end up purchasing a new board anyway. Luckily my HDD is fine, and I got the data I need for school (which ends in 3 weeks) onto my laptop. But pretty much I will not be playing UT for a while, as I am so loaded with projects, homework, and finals, PLUS work AND ROTC that until school is over I do not have ANY free time. See you all serverside in a month, hopefully sooner.

Yrrek

omg that sucks man sorry. was it on a surge protector?

Yeah, but I guess it was as high quality as I thought. =(

Houdini wrote:omg that sucks man sorry. was it on a surge protector?

As an electrician friend said to me when I asked about lightning and if it could get through my very expensive surge protector his response...


"it's LIGHTNING"

nuff said.

Sorry to hear about the board dude. Is it booting up at all? I'm wondering if your psu may have just got fried?

I'm sure lightning can get through my protectors, but APC is responsible for replacing whatever gets nuked .

Sounds like you were running on an older machine (like mine). Probably time to upgrade your video card and RAM too since most things are DDR2 and PCIe. Maybe lightning is how I can finally upgrade!

While I built my rig almost 4 years ago now, I have been upgrading gradually. I bought my video card (8x AGP ATI Radeon X800 XT) when it came out for $500, and it still runs great and does what I need it to very easily. Two sticks of 512MB DDR 400 RAM which isn't that high end, and never really was, but I don't need it to be, so that is fine.

So I guess I could upgrade them, but I don't have the money to do a complete overhaul like that unless I get a raise, which my boss is currently pushing for and I will find out soon. *crosses fingers*

Non, good point about the lightning thing, but I don't think that is what caused the outage. The skies were actually clear. I know that my whole block was out though. I also tested the PSU with multiple testers, it's fine. The problem is definitely the mobo and/or proc. Hopefully none of my cards got hosed either. I am pretty sure the RAM is good. I am going to go today to a local store called Recycle North, apparently they have good computer parts and systems just chillin on the shelves. So hopefully they have either a cheapo socket A system for me to purchase or take the mobo/proc from to test my current stuff in. *sigh* If only I had more money, haha. Thanks guys

check your surge protector deal...some of em will pay if you can prove it didn't help

All you should need is a letter from the electric company about the outage

Well since nothing else on the surge protector was effected, I am thinking it actually wasn't the fault of the protector. I think that what caused my board to fry is the fact that the power went on and off about 4-6 times in rapid succession. I have my board set so that whenever there is a power outage my computer automatically reboots when it has power again. So I think that is what caused it.

Question about RAM though, as I have been out of the hardware game for a year and a half or so:
will my DDR400 RAM 168 pin DIMM work in a DDR2 slot?
Video card:
I currently have an AGP card, and I don't want to upgrade my card just yet. How easy is it to find a board with AGP and PCI-E? Is this cost effective?

Thanks guys!

All my new parts except for motherboard came in today, and I am expecting the motherboard tomorrow. This weekend I will be installing Gentoo Linux. UT2004 ETA: Next Wednesday (02MAY07).

nice hook it up man!

Ok, so I finally got my desktop up and running. Didn't have as much time to put towards my computer this past week as I was hoping due to work and a few other things. But I should be back in about two weeks! See my other post in "Did that really happen?" for more details!