My brother and I have separate systems. Mine is a brand new AMD X2 system – but my brother is using a considerably older machine. Lately everything seems to go wrong with it.
RAM
First to go was the RAM. Simtronics 512 MB. One fine day the computer stopped booting. At first I had no idea what went wrong. After an hour or so of troubleshooting, I popped in a Linux live CD(Knoppix) and ran the ‘memtest’ utility. That confirmed that the RAM was faulty. So I opened the hood and removed the faulty RAM – this system had 2×512 MB RAM – so the computer will continue functioning.
Virus
Next was a software issue – more specifically, a virus. As of yet we have no idea how it got in. Anyway, the virus spread out through the system infecting the exe files. So, we formatted the C drive and decided to install Linux. That’s when everything started to go terribly wrong.
At first the Linux installation was a success – but windows stopped working. So I decided to reinstall it – that’s when I got the bad news – the Harddisk cannot be partitioned – the partition table is corrupted. I am sure that is one of the worst things you could hear if you are in the computer industry. That means that all your data is lost.
But we were lucky – since we had multiple systems, I managed to copy all the data to my system – so the data lose was minimal. Anyway then I rewrote the partition table. I reinstalled Linux(Debian Etch) and my brother installed Windows XP on it. This nightmare lasted 3 days. It was fun – and good old Murphy was with us all the way.
HDD
As in the case of the RAM, my brother has 2 harddisks – a 80GB and a 20GB. Just 3 days ago, the system started crashing frequently without warning. Luckily this time the reason was more clear – at boot time, an error message was shown – clearly putting the blame or the 20GB HDD.
So we removed it – and everything when back to normal. I am still looking into what is wrong with it.
What Next?
Statistically speaking, something should go wrong with this system this Friday. Anyone want to guess which part will die out this time? My guess is the UPS – it has been acting oddly for some time now.
What do you think? Which component will blow out this time?
My guess would be power supply! 🙂
I had similar problems with my PC also.
It was like RAM->Virus->Virus->Power unit crashed->Repaired everything, waiting for next one. 😀
Well, no problems yet. Going to buy a replacement for the HDD tomorrow.
i want dsl commection
In my case, the monitor crashed and flickered in pink color. Then the harddrive became corrupt and totally out. Then I replaced the computer..
With the he kind of abuse my comp has suffered, I am surprised it has survived so long. Other than my hard drive crashing and me loosing 10 gb of LEGAL music painstakingly collected over 5 years, nothing major has ever gone wrong.
oh, did i mention i have reformatted my drive 29 times in five years?
@schizo
You are using the same system for 5 years? Time to get a new one.