TOPIC: ASROCK
Still able to build PC systems
25th October 2009This weekend has been something of a success for me on the PC hardware front. Earlier this year, a series of mishaps rendered my former main home PC unusable; it was a power failure that finished it off for good. My remedy was a rebuild using my then usual recipe of a Gigabyte motherboard, AMD CPU and crucial memory. However, assembling the said pieces never returned the thing to life and I ended up in no man's land for a while, dependent on and my backup machine and laptop. That wouldn't have been so bad but for the need for accessing data from the old behemoth's hard drives, but an external drive housing set that in order. Nevertheless, there is something unfinished about work with machines having a series of external drives hanging off them. That appearance of disarray was set to rights by the arrival of a bare-bones system from Novatech in July, with any assembly work restricted to the kitchen table. There was a certain pleasure in seeing a system come to life after my developing a fear that I had lost all of my PC building prowess.
That restoration of order still left finding out why those components bought earlier in the year didn't work together well enough to give me a screen display on start-up. Having electronics testing equipment and the knowledge of its correct use would make any troubleshooting far easier, but I haven't got these. While there is a place near to me where I could go for this, you are left wondering what might be said to a PC build gone wrong. Of course, the last thing that you want to be doing is embarking on a series of purchases that do not resolve the problem, especially in the current economic climate.
One thing to suspect when all doesn't turn out as hoped is the motherboard and, for whatever reason, I always suspect it last. It now looks as if that needs to change after I discovered that it was the Gigabyte motherboard that was at fault. Whether it was faulty from the outset or it came a cropper with a rogue power supply or careless with static protection is something that I'll never know. An Asus motherboard did go rogue on me in the past, and it might be that it ruined CPU's and even a hard drive before I laid it to rest. Its eventual replacement put a stop to a year of computing misfortune and kick-started my reliance on Gigabyte. While that faith is under question now, the 2009 computing hardware mishap seems to be behind me and any PC rebuilds will be done on tables and motherboards will be suspected earlier when anything goes awry.
Returning to the present, my acquisition of an ASRock K10N78 and subsequent building activities has brought a new system using an AMD Phenom X4 CPU and 4 GB of memory into use. In fact, I am writing these very words using the thing. It's all in a new TrendSonic case too (placing an elderly behemoth into retirement) and with a SATA hard drive and DVD writer. Since the new motherboard has onboard audio and graphics, external cards are not needed unless you are an audiophile and/or a gamer; for the record, I am neither. Those additional facilities make for easier building and fault-finding should the undesirable happen.
The new box is running the release candidate of Ubuntu 9.10, which seems to be working without a hitch too. Since earlier builds of 9.10 broke in their VirtualBox VM, you should understand the level of concern that this aroused in my mind; the last thing that you want to be doing is reinstalling an operating system because its booting capability breaks every other day. Thankfully, the RC seems to have none of these rough edges, so I can upgrade the Novatech box, still my main machine and likely to remain so for now, with peace of mind when the time comes.