Re: Spontaneous unclean reboots

Curt wrote:

Right, one of those pci-e cards. A lot of these boards seem to have
built-in ethernet. How's that working in linux, or does it depend
entirely on the "brand"?

Thee are a few that don't work well in Linux, but nVidia based cards has at least this far been a safe bet, myself I have recently got myself two ASUS Crosshair II Formula boards (think they can be too much for you, ment to be microsoft gamer boards to easily be overclocked), I'm using a quite recent kernel with it, but you can get most of the things to work with a 2,6.21 kernel with a small BIOS change (you need to change the SATA to use ahci)


I could always put the D-Link I'm using now in
there, if there's a regular pci slot--there always seems to be one, but
only one.

Don't go for those mATX cards, they are slightly cheaper, but you do want a better one. You should find a good deal with at least two PCI (mine has that and three PCIe-16 and two PCIe-1).

Usually the built in NIC will use less CPU power than those PCI cards, so try to use that in first place.


Well, yes, I think that's the thing to do, seeing that these boards
I've been looking at only have one ATA IDE connector, and if I used it
for my current hard drive, I wouldn't be able to hook up my dvd player.

One IDE connector can have two devices hooked, so no problem to connect your IDE hard drive and DVD player at the same time. The problem comes if you have three IDE devices...


Maybe the latter exist with a SATA interface, but I think I'll just do
a fresh install on a new SATA drive.

Sure, there are SATA DVDrw and aren't that much more expensive than cheap IDE DVDrw.

You can always use dd to copy the old hard drive to the new one, as you can have those hooked at the same time, including your DVD player.


If you are going to upgrade, you will need more or less upgrade everything, just don't over spend, a quad core CPU won't make you type faster, if typing would be your main use of the computer.

Correct. I don't need too muscular a machine for what I do.

Don't look on those "fast" ram modules, you don't gain much in performance, spending the extra bucks on the CPU and you gain a lot more.

If you are going the AMD/nVidia path, select an AM2+ mother board, as this allows you to upgrade your CPU at a later state and it's supposed to be possible to run an AM3 CPU on them (next generation from AMD).

If you go for Intel, see to have one with an intel nic in it and you should be on the safe side.

A motherboard with built in graphics can be an option, if it has PCIe-16 slots where you can later on add a better graphics card, a motherboard with Crossfire will support multiple ATi cards from AMD while SLI will support multiple nVidia cards, but if you don't use heavy graphics (games in microsoft envirinment), then SLI/Crossfire is quite useless for you and you can save 10 bucks to select a motherboard without such support.

--

//Aho
.

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