Hardware must not like me
So, Sunday night (or early Monday morning), I’m happily using my computer when the display goes garbled and it locks up. I’m then faced with a computer that will not even POST. Assuming it’s the video card, I remove it, then blow out the 1 year and 2 months of dust that accumulated in the fan and heatsink. I plug it back in, turn the computer on, and I’m faced with this. When you see something that looks like an old-school ASCII game, you tend to assume the worst.
So I did what first came to mind and headed directly to XFX’s site to request an RMA. Today was the day I sent the card to them, and hopefully the replacement will arrive soon. I realized yesterday that using my laptop sucks as a replacement computer, due to its tendency to reboot whenever it wants (a heat issue, I suspect), even though I used it the entire month my hard drive was dying. So, I switched to one of my spare desktop systems instead. It has a Voodoo 3!
I also upgraded to WordPress 2.0.1, and also read this lengthy post from the author of the anti-spam plugin I use, Spam Karma.
February 2nd, 2006 at 5:36 PM
Yeah, classic symptom of the GPU toasting itself. That sucks. Good luck with the replacement, the last time we had to RMA a video card at work we got one back that was warped and couldn’t even be installed in a machine cause it wouldn’t go in the AGP slot. I’ve got a Radeon x300SE (PCIe) for cheap if you need one in the interm.
-Cov
February 2nd, 2006 at 10:08 PM
Well, that would help if it wasn’t an AGP card…
February 13th, 2006 at 2:32 AM
i have an old Cirrus logic PCI, in fact I have too many of them. they’re not good cards but they’re better than nothing. see if you can snag one at a salvage store.