Feb
16
Ok, I spoke to soon. I thought video was my only problem.On Tuesday I planned to work at home, to get a lot of code written for OPUS and found my computer locked. I kept restarting it, kept getting kernel panics. The temperature was fine, there was no abnormal load, I tried a new kernel or four, and apparently got a bit more stability. The graphics problems were worse than ever, and I get fed up and bought an ATI HD2600 Pro, which solved all those problems.
Still the machine kept locking. I eventually began to suspect the memory.
I'd already run memtest over the whole thing (one pass) with no problems, but then I tried booting into memtest after one lock, and got thousands of errors. Long story short, I've tried swapping modules, running on one module, nothing I can do will make the system stable. I of course had already tried a BIOS update. That was a problem in its own right - the most recent BIOS was incorrectly stamped and would not flash, I've notified ASUS who have taken it off the site.
Anyway, I've now found out I'm not alone. I bought slightly slower memory than I intended because I was warned of problems, but I'm now actually forcing it to run slower still. Having said that, others have reported this is not a successful stop gap fix since they are still getting crashes. So, for now, don't buy this board until they have the memory issues sorted out.
Anyway, I've now found out I'm not alone. I bought slightly slower memory than I intended because I was warned of problems, but I'm now actually forcing it to run slower still. Having said that, others have reported this is not a successful stop gap fix since they are still getting crashes. So, for now, don't buy this board until they have the memory issues sorted out.
Update
I eventually began to wonder if the PSU was to blame, and though when I went to buy a new PSU I was advised of frequent problems with this board, I decided to get both a new motherboard (for gondolin) in time, and a PSU. The new motherboard still crashed once, though it was much more reliable, when I booted it back into memtest I get lots of memory failures in different locations. I've since installed the new PSU, and everything seems stable. Hurrah!
04/15/08 15:24:53
Tux droid isn't free
Ok, so I should have checked an odd message I saw when I installed the 32 bit debs, but now I know that tux droid is not entirely free. As some of you will know I've had some spectacular bad luck with failing hardware both at home and at work recently