Man, what a day...
My wife's computer suddenly started booting really slowly, like 3 to 4 times longer than usual. The hd activity light would be locked on during the slowdowns, so I figured it was the hd. Backed everything up, and tried to run partition magic to resize the OS partition. Thought it might have gotten too full and was causing the issues.
Partition magic froze on one small partition, so I deleted the partition, then the hd died. The computer wouldn't recognize it... It's an old 80 gig seagate drive with 2mb cache, so it's not a big loss, but it was the wife's main drive.
While trying to remove the old 5900 ultra so I could pull the hd cage, I got caught up in the lever catch on the agp slot, and busted a capacitor off the board...
Due to this, I decided just to move her stuff to my intel P4 3.2G machine, Asus P4C800E deluxe, 2G ddr, 6800 ultra machine. Rebuilt the main drive for her info and preferences, then started noticing spots of green on the screen. Within minutes I had fully blown graphics artifacts. Took the card out, took it apart and cleaned the heatsink, and added AS5, but the card was fried... Artifacts on the bios splash screen... Went upstairs and found my wife's old 9700 All in wonder card, and it's working fine, though a bit slow... Don't know why the 6800 ultra fried, it hadn't been used for a few months, but when I retired it it worked fine...
So lost an hd and two vid cards in about an hour. Haven't had a hardware failure in years.
Anyway, decided to get one more AGP card to keep the machines running. Went to Newegg and found Sapphire makes a 512mb 3850 in the AGP format, so I ordered it. Got it for $129, not bad at all. I understand Sapphire is keeping up with driver issues, so hopefully it'll work out. Should be about as fast as an AGP machine can get... Also ordered a 1TB Seagate Barracuda. Not sure I should continue with Seagate as they're the only drives I've had go bad, but it has a 32 cache where the WD's were slower and only had 16. Got it for $129 also. Seems a lot of these bigger drives are failing, hope this one doesn't as it's going to be my central data storage backup disk. Probably should have gotten an ES.2 drive rather than the 7200.11 but they're smaller and a lot more expensive...
This'll keep these two AGP machines up and running, an intel P4 3.2G/ATi 3850 setup for my wife's personal and gaming setup, and her old machine, an AMD 3800+/9700 all in wonder for our phone/download mule/bookkeeping setup.
My wife's computer suddenly started booting really slowly, like 3 to 4 times longer than usual. The hd activity light would be locked on during the slowdowns, so I figured it was the hd. Backed everything up, and tried to run partition magic to resize the OS partition. Thought it might have gotten too full and was causing the issues.
Partition magic froze on one small partition, so I deleted the partition, then the hd died. The computer wouldn't recognize it... It's an old 80 gig seagate drive with 2mb cache, so it's not a big loss, but it was the wife's main drive.
While trying to remove the old 5900 ultra so I could pull the hd cage, I got caught up in the lever catch on the agp slot, and busted a capacitor off the board...
Due to this, I decided just to move her stuff to my intel P4 3.2G machine, Asus P4C800E deluxe, 2G ddr, 6800 ultra machine. Rebuilt the main drive for her info and preferences, then started noticing spots of green on the screen. Within minutes I had fully blown graphics artifacts. Took the card out, took it apart and cleaned the heatsink, and added AS5, but the card was fried... Artifacts on the bios splash screen... Went upstairs and found my wife's old 9700 All in wonder card, and it's working fine, though a bit slow... Don't know why the 6800 ultra fried, it hadn't been used for a few months, but when I retired it it worked fine...
So lost an hd and two vid cards in about an hour. Haven't had a hardware failure in years.
Anyway, decided to get one more AGP card to keep the machines running. Went to Newegg and found Sapphire makes a 512mb 3850 in the AGP format, so I ordered it. Got it for $129, not bad at all. I understand Sapphire is keeping up with driver issues, so hopefully it'll work out. Should be about as fast as an AGP machine can get... Also ordered a 1TB Seagate Barracuda. Not sure I should continue with Seagate as they're the only drives I've had go bad, but it has a 32 cache where the WD's were slower and only had 16. Got it for $129 also. Seems a lot of these bigger drives are failing, hope this one doesn't as it's going to be my central data storage backup disk. Probably should have gotten an ES.2 drive rather than the 7200.11 but they're smaller and a lot more expensive...
This'll keep these two AGP machines up and running, an intel P4 3.2G/ATi 3850 setup for my wife's personal and gaming setup, and her old machine, an AMD 3800+/9700 all in wonder for our phone/download mule/bookkeeping setup.
