At least one PC is done…

To my surprise, the GeForce 5600 card was problematic. I say to my surprise because it actually works, only for a very short time. Back a few months, my sister returned here and she booted her PC. After a few minutes the PC hanged and she called me to ask what was wrong.

At first, she blamed the hang on the programs I had installed on her PC while she was gone (for the better part of six months), which is typical of people to think others are to blame because they “touched” it and now it’s broke!

Of course the issue was completely different, having to do with the VGA cooling fan being stuck and not working, which led to high temperatures in the VGA core and thus the hang. It was a mess, once I pulled it out and tried to apply lubricant to it’s ball bearing, the whole thing fell apart and some kind of rusty substance was apparent on everything inside.

I thought that with one hang the card would be fine (probably correlating with a main CPU but now I know I shouldn’t have) so I saved it and got a new fan. The new fan works great, but the card does not…

It will show its BIOS information upon boot, but then the whole system hangs at the main POST and doesn’t even produce beep codes… I do not have the technical knowledge to explain this, so I guestimate that the card is so messed up that even the slightest temperature differential from idle is enough to hang it.

At least, the old card is working great and the system is running smoothly and much faster than it used to. I also think that the new onboard sound card is better than the last one, I played a short video to test both DirectDraw and DirectSound and I could swear that I could hear it clearer…

Anyway, tomorrow I will go and try to find the cheapest VGA available (probably from a second hand store) to install in the NAS system… Can’t do anything else till I’m able to see a screen output. The system is pretty much build, all it misses is a VGA.