Monday, March 25, 2002
Today I brought in a load of old computer bits and pieces in to Peter L. at work. He told me sometime last week that he commonly recycles such bits and pieces and turns them into "new" computers for people who commonly ask him about a basic computer for their kids. Since I had recently taken my old, flaky system apart and had a number of old, surplus video cards and the like, I brought him a batch of such parts, including a motherboard.
He asked me what sort of motherboard it was, and I told him it was an old Celeron 400. I also told him about my perennial problem with this machine -- that it would often just freeze, sometimes to continue on as if nothing happened minutes later, or just defiantly stay locked up.
Peter then smiled and told me what the problem was: it was an overclocked computer. Now, I had thought about that possibility before, but having the motherboard in front of him clinched his case. The motherboard was designed when the maximum speed for a Celeron was 333Mhz -- not the 400Mhz chip supposedly on it. So I was sold a 400Mhz system when in fact it was an overclocked 333Mhz. In many cases this wouldn't cause a problem -- a lot of people overclock their processors without incident -- but the motherboard wasn't built for that speed. So the processor would either overheat or the motherboard couldn't handle the speed of the IO properly, and in either case lock up.
Grrr... It was this system that convinced me not to go with smaller system manufacturers -- this system came from a small, local operation -- and instead pay the extra fees incurred by brand name manufactures. I was never going to buy another system from the guy who sold me that dud system, but now at least I know what the system was a dud in the first place.
Peter is welcome to the motherboard -- I feel I am well rid of it in any event. His plan for it is to use it in "new" system he is making for his mother, whose own system died recently. He'll "re-clock" it to its proper speed and set the machine up properly for her. I'm keeping the old system's hard drives, at least one of which will be the dedicated heart of a Linux box I can play with, and I'll recycle its network card for one that seems to have died in another machine.
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