I've been spending the weekend getting stuff working after the hurricane.

I had to reaim the satellite dish, which turned out to be a major PITA, because the mast wasn't (and has never been) vertical. So I had to shim up the base that it was attached to to get plumb, then reattach the dish, and reaim it. It was still tough, because the elevation indicator seemed to be miscalibrated, but if I'd had to do it with a cockeyed mast, it would have been much worse.

Then I started having computer problems. I have a brand new motheboard, Sempron CPU and gigabyte of DDR 4200 RAM in my main (Windows) machine, and it's been fine until last night, when I got up this morning to find that it woke up dead. I rebooted, and it came up, sans mouse, and after it was on a while, I started to get strange patterns on the screen af which point it locked up again. After trying this several times, it eventually quit booting at all.

Anyone have any theories? The problem is that this is the first mobo of its generation that I've bought, so I've got no other processors or memory to swap out to see if they're the problem. The only thing that I can hope is that the video card has died, which I can test with another.

I'm posting this from my Fedora box, if anyone is wondering. I also have a couple laptops, so it's not urgent--just annoying.

[Update on Sunday]

I finally got around to playing with this. I swapped out the video card, and it booted right up...

Make you sure you have the latest chipset drivers. I also don't know if AMD still requires the AGP drivers, though if it is a new Mobo, you probably have ePCI.

If you have Knoppix Linux [runs live from a CD] try running it. Knoppix does excellent hardware tests on bootup, it often reveals problems.

Both ideas are excellent. Also your thought on checking memory is a good idea. If your machine is not booting at all, bad memory is usually the best place to start looking.

My laptop would power up, no POST, then power off again, I thought the CMOS battery was toast, but it was the memory causing the system to power off because a microscopic short from the memory stick to the motherboard.

Mac