Apparently this is bad hardware month. My parents old HP Pavilion started rebooting on it’s own. The culprit: shitty OEM 100W power supply. I gutted it and put the inards into an Antec minitower case with a 350W power supply. Problem solved.
Then last week when Margeaux turned on my desktop machine (Also a Pavilion), the video was squirrely. The video card in that machine is..was a PNY GeForce Ti440. A pretty sweet gaming card until that day. Figuring that maybe the power supply was also going bad (which makes the power hungry Ti card go crazy), I went out and snagged another Antec case; the PLUS1080AMG. This one is a full tower soho file server case with 6 fans, loads of bays and a 440W power supply.
Well, wouldn’t you know it. That didn’t solve the video problem. So I called PNY and it’s getting replaced under their lifetime replacement warranty. And now I have and awesome case for the next time I build a machine. I must say , with 6 fans, this case is really quiet. But then again, I also have 4 servers in a rack sitting beside me.
I went out tonight to snag a couple of CD → sound card cables before I closed up the case. I was really temped to snag an ATI Radeo 9700 Pro.