Haven’t posted much recently, due, in part to the absence of a computer.

The old girl finally gave up the ghost and shut down forever. There had been intermittent problems and signs of impending doom such as a hard drive failure which resulted in some lost data. I know I should have had backups and I was going to do them ‘tomorrow’ but I never actually did it.

I managed to recover about 80% of the data using the hard drive in a freezer trick. I didn’t for one second believe it would work, but luckily I was proved wrong.

Finally the main board died and that was it. It worked out cheaper in the end to get a new system rather than to get new main board and have to upgrade all the components along with it.

I settled for a ‘barebones’ system from Novatech which comprised of:

MSI Intel 975X PCI Express Mainboard
Intel E6600 Core2Duo processor
1024Mb DDR2 667Mhz PC5400 RAM
Thermaltake Tsunami Dream ATX case

I got it up and running with a Maxtor 200Gb SATA drive plus all other components salvaged from the old system such as the LG DVD writer, LG DVD player, GeForce 7600GS 256MB DDR2 graphics card.

What followed was the usual slog of re-installing the OS (Windows XP Pro), all the software and re-configuring to get everything ‘just right’. Well it’s all done now, so things can get back to whatever normal is supposed to be.

Next on the agenda is to set up Linux (Suse 9.2 Pro), so I can have my dual boot machine again.