Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Sat, 29 May 2010 03:52:45 -0700 (PDT), mike
wrote:
I buy piles of them from the local recyclers. Those are the ones that
work. You should see the piles and piles that didn't.
Hmm, you must work on 'puters alot! One of my favorite places to hang
out up till a couple years ago was the local 'puter recycler - I'd go
there at least every other week and end up spending all my disposable
income for the week (all 2 dollars of it
. When the bottom dropped
out of that market they had to close since none of the outfits they'd
been sending the stuff to would give them any money for it any more.
I miss that place, the guy who ran it was formerly a corporate IT
guy, they always had some kind of great deals going on.
Well, I had several browser windows open and of a sudden the bowser
was stuck viewing the last one I'd been looking at - the mouse cursor
would still move around as it should but clicking on stuff had no
effect. Couldn't close any browser windows, couldn't start up any
other programs, couldn't shutdown the machine, except by pushing and
holding down the power button.
Basically, the operating system got lost. That could be anything. Bad
motherboard, flakey IDE device, flakey plug in card, or even a bad
keyboard/mouse can hang the machine. However, it also can be a bad
sector on the HD. If you can get it to boot, try scanning the HD for
bad sectors and disallocating them. Then, keep track of the number of
bad sectors on the drive. Any increase, and it's eWaste.
OK, now I've got a couple new programs to learn, I'll be setting up a
spare-parts machine so I can dig into this
further, maybe restore some of the older pieces of hardware I've got
hanging about, or at least classify as to whether I need to hang onto
or not.
I haven't tried anything newer than 9.10, after I tried and failed to
figure how to get my modem working with it I went back to 8.04, which
seems much more intuitive to me.
What's a modem? Is that like dialup? I use those when desperate or
visting stone age retro enthusiasts.
Yeah, I know, I seem to keep slipping back into the stone age, been
that way since 1993, one step forward, etc.. There's DSL at work
so at least I'm getting a little familiar with that - kinda makes
surfing at home at 56K a bit of a drag though...
Thanks, I'll have to see if I can get this SmartMonTools in 8.04.
http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/smartmontools
Ah, thanks for the link!