John's shiny new computer may contain marginal components that are unable to play together.
This happens, and happens more often as complexity and performance go up, and hardware quality asymptotes towards the minimum acceptable (which means that some fraction of production output fails). Wherever there is an engineer designing systems for improved performance and quality, there is a bean counter using those new techniques to turn the dial back towards "just barely worth buying". Then hide the defects with advertising and social media. So, one (or more) of John's components may be defective; I would bring the system up in a location where there are multiple components to swap in and out (including power supplies, keyboards, cables, and other "simple" stuff), and build upwards from a bare minimum (VGA and small boot drive) towards the full system, and learn which additional component breaks it. Of course, Linux may be that "additional component", because it uses the hardware somewhat differently than Windoze. Windoze sometimes has little built-in tweaks for buggy hardware that Linux does not. I've run into both, over the years. As always, search many Linux forums for others using the same hardware, successfully or not. Specifications do not enforce themselves, and commodity motherboard and peripheral manufacturers won't remove bugs from their hardware if Windoze (with patches) can run on it, even if Linux cannot. Me, I'd delay investment in new hardware until new CPUs with fixes for Meltdown and Spectre become available. That, plus the fixes for the fixes, will take a while. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
