My workbench PC, which does all of the programming and testing for just about everything I build, crashed on Thursday. Hard. I had under a minute's warning that something was going on, long enough to find out that it'd been quietly dying long enough that backups hadn't been able to run in a couple of days.
It looks like the RAM is shot, and the motherboard had a couple of bad electrolytic caps. In the process of dying it also managed to thoroughly thrash the operating system (your computer is dying and you're trying to shut down? Here, just let me install these 16 newly downloaded patches before I shut off!) , but I think I recovered everything important. No one carries any useful parts locally anymore, so I went out and got a new machine. Like all new Windows machines, it's pre-installed with Vista. Which won't run ANYTHING I need it to run. Not a problem, but it also won't let me install XP. Never gets past the "Setup is examining your hardware configuration" bit. Tried two different XP CDs and two different CD ROM drives. I can boot my Ultimate Boot CD and run a dozen different hard drive utilities, none of which can see the drive, and most of which just lock up when they try. Tried adding a spare PCI SATA controller, to no avail. Tried EIDE with another drive, too. Any suggestions on getting this thing to run XP? I've been out of the PC repair business for a long time and I know I'm rusty, but I really don't know why this thing is giving me so much trouble. My backup plan is to rebuild the old machine, which is going to mean ordering some parts. I really need at least a couple of PCI slots (for data acquisition boards and such) and a bunch of USB ports - my old motherboard had an even dozen. I've got an AGP video card that handles capture from the stereo microscope, but I can replace that if necessary. Any ideas on where to find an ATX motherboard with a decent number of PCI slots? Scott
