Computer Troubles

Had a streak of bad luck with my computer hardware. Fortunately everything seems to be resolved now.

Old machine. My quad core setup was acting funny, with very little rhyme or reason. Very frustrating to debug, since the issues were not repeatable. Just seemingly random system freezes. The boot logs showed an error with the CPU temperature sensor, so not sure if this was a root cause. However, there appeared to be more problems when the machine was cold (e.g. after being powered off all night), and few problems after the machine had been running for a while.

New Machine. Decided to just upgrade my hardware, since I had wanted a new case for a while anyway. Actually "downgraded" to a dual core, but performance seems better nonetheless. HD video playback is smoother, perhaps due to GPU acceleration in Flash/Chrome. But at first I had issues with freezes on the new system. Fortunately these problems were repeatable - memtest failed at the same location every time. Turns out one of my memory sticks was seated incorrectly. Swapped the memory sticks, and the problems went away entirely.

DSL. My internet connection cut out one day, and I also happened to notice a maintenance worker behind my apartment that morning. Not sure if he was cable or phone company, but apparently someone mis-patched my phone line. After a considerable amount of time on the phone with AT&T tech support, they finally agreed to send a lineman to my house. Sure enough, the line was dead when he got here. He re-patched my line and it's worked fine ever since.

Distro. Toyed with the idea of running a rolling release of Linux (Linux Mint Debian Edition). Unfortunately, Debian testing is still pretty quirky - the seamlessness of the Ubuntu experience is hard to beat. So I ended up going back to Ubuntu 10.04. I realized that 10.10 didn't buy me much over 10.04, and my 10.04 install already had Intel Fortran on it. The real kicker is that I manually installed more recent software for the packages I was most concerned with. That is, there are only a handful of packages that I care about being cutting edge. So I manually installed the 2.6.38 kernel from the Ubuntu mainline PPA and upgraded the nvidia drivers accordingly. Also added the banshee PPA to get the latest updates to the Amazon MP3 client plugin. Ditched OpenOffice in favor of the LibreOffice PPA - I want as little Oracle software on my system as possible.