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Mobo Gone

October 25, 2006

It took me awhile to get back online; computer suddenly went dead about a month’s ago. Took me a few days to find out it was the motherboard – a short-circuit near the USB jumper (I had the feeling that one of the USB devices was drawing too much current from the USB port and blew up the circuit. I wasn’t sure.)

Tried at first to find a replacement for the faulty mobo but soon had to conclude that it wasn’t worth the effort. Intel is allowing its CPU platform design an increasingly shorter and shorter life cycle. The Intel CPU I had, although not more than 3 years’ old, needed a Socket 478 which, unfortunately, was already outdated. To buy a new mobo with the current Socket 775 design would of course require me to replace my CPU as well. Thanks to the cheap labour in India and here in China, a new mobo |+ a new processor would cost me over 50% of the price for a mid-range branded pc completed with LCD screen, keyboard, CD-RW, harddisk, card reader, fancy mouse, XP Home and a pair of nice speakers. There is no point to do any computer DIY these days?

I ended up buying a Dell – Dual core processor + 2GB ram + card reader + DVD-RW + 160GB SATA harddisk. The complete package, I reckon, cost me no more than 40% over that of a new mobo and a new processor.

Well, it’s my first ever branded pc since my first encounter with a computer in 1976.

It’s an awesome machine, 2 CPUs and 2GB ram. I was eager to try out something which I couldn’t do with my old machine, like running 3 or 4 pcs at the same time. Readers of this blog should know that I am not much a Microsoft fan but since my new Dell has XP Pro pre-installed, I might as well try to rediscover Windoz.

I set up Virtual PC 2004 (available free from Microsoft) in XP Pro. What Virtual PC does is essentially to emulate a new pc within your existing desktop. The emulation of a standalone pc enables users to do whatever they wish within the virtual machine without affecting the existing operating system. It is ideal for testing software and is especially useful to people who want to get themselves acquainted with installation process of a separate operating system. It eliminates the need to dual boot or triple boot and it also does away the need to re-partition the harddisk. It conveniently deals with iso images – Virtual PC allows the user to simply mount an iso image (under the menu item CD – capture ISO image) and use it as if it is a physical CDROM. LiveCD or downloaded installation CDs can be run directly from harddisk without first burning them to a physical disc. (Note: Virtual PC 2004 has a size limitation on the mountable iso image – a bug? If you want to try out Vista by downloading an evaluation copy, you will need an undocumented, unsupported free tool from Microsoft – VirtualCD Control Panel to mount the downloaded images.)

Here are some images I captured when playing with my VMs. As for Vista, my first impression is that it is just XP + Yahoo Widget + fancier icons. It is awfully slow under Virtual PC 2004. I also created VMs for Ubuntu 6.06, Mepis, Suse 10.1, Mandriva 10, Debian 3.1. All went smoothly and booted up the first time.

  Vista Image 1
  Vista Image 2
MePIS
  Ubuntu 6.06

Posted to General at October 25, 2006 02:00 PM :    Furl It!    del.icio.us

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