So, I went home to Anderson this weekend to do various things. One of those things was to restore the network to functionality (they switched ISPs and as such ended up with my 4 machines there disconnected). Most of the restoration was completed by pushing a wire in and moving the router up the stair case; however, one of my machines had given up the desire to keep going. Ultimately, I discovered two problems with it:

1) It needed more air circulation as it was crashing under either heavy disk access or heavy cpu usage. I drilled a hole in the side of the case directly above the cpu and northbridge and installed a fan in the hole. This stopped the crashes there.

2) The network card betrayed me yet again. This particular network card had caused problems in the past on several occasions. I replaced it with an old Realtek 8029 network card (10 Base-T is good enough for most things). Once it had been replaced, I decided to take the old network card and make it an example to any other devices that choose to betray me.

I chose to proceed by taking the drill bit that I had used earlier and punching two holes right through its controller chip. Two in the head and all that.





Blur = camera phone.

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