On Thursday 14 July 2011 2336:49 Felix Miata Felix Miata <mrmazda@earthlink.net> wrote:
On 2011/07/14 16:29 (GMT+0300) Stan Goodman composed:
my venerable Pentium 4 motherboard died yesterday
Died how? Many motherboards supporting P4 chips were built using defective caps. Typically cap replacement puts them back in service, and as long as your eye/hand coordination and vision aren't too bad, it isn't too hard to do. There are howtos describing the process. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague describes the problem and may have a howto link.
I'm very good, in fact, with a soldering iron etc., but I thought it was time anyway for a new board. As for capacitors, nothing that fails only after nine years can be said to have been defective. How it died was very sneaky. The first step was a popped-up notice that the amount of RAM had changed. I removed the RAM cards and cleaned the contacts thoroughly. The following day, it wouldn't boot at all because it didn't see the HDs. I interpreted this as meaning that some connections had become intermittent, and that the time had come to retire the board, the BIOS date of which is 2002 (which you remarked about recently), so it deserved to go out to pasture (retirement to stud is not available to MBs).
If you're using the same case and PS for the new motherboard, better open up the PS and inspect for possible bad caps. You wouldn't want to risk damaging the new one and have to install all over again soon or suffer downtime for warranty replacement for an easily avoided problem.
I am indeed using same case (but little else other than HDs). The PS had been replaced only about two months ago. Since the new board doesn't support ATAPI, the DVD drive is new. There is no support for floppy drive, which was anyway a nostalgic feature of little utility.. Over the weekend I will google to see what Tumbleweed is, and likely try it out. -- Stan Goodman Qiryat Tiv'on Israel -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org