Shuttle

A while back – quite a while back, as it happens – I bought a new PC. All very sexy, a little Shuttle box, 64 bit AMD processor, blah blah.

Regular readers will have noticed that I haven’t mentioned it all that much. There’s a reason for that – it’s still not working.

I’ve tried pretty much all I can think of, short of cannibalising the hard drive out of the old PC and shoving that in to see if anything works that way. The list so far includes:

• complete disassembly and reassembly – including checking the seating/positioning of the processor
• Installing Windows XP, Xp64 and 2000
• Installing Mandrake and Ubuntu linuxes (Linii?)
• Swapping out various components, to see if there are problems on those

I’ve also changed from an SATA drive to a normal IDE drive.

The problem is that while nothing has so far installed properly or run properly, the errors are never the same. It’s normally that some file or other isn’t installed, or is corrupted, but then every so often you get an “IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL” error, or a different Screen Of Death. The Linux installs die with a totally corrupted screen, so I’ve no idea what the problem there is.

The only conclusion I’m left with now is that the motherboard itself is screwed. Unless anyone else has any other ideas about what it could be?