After weighing my hardware options very carefully, I have decided to attempt a complete motherboard replacement and a repair installation on Windows with a new video card. Yes, that sounds like a lot, but it saves me the trouble of replacing the hard drives, DVD writer, power supply, RAM and case. If it fails, I’ll return the motherboard and just start with a fresh new system (but with the same SATA hard drives).
Here are the risks that I foresee:
- basic problems with seating the motherboard in the case (grounding it properly, etc)
- seating the fan properly
- hoping that the Zalman fan and the new PCI-X graphics card will fit inside the miniATX motherboard (and more importantly, not being blocked by the humungous fan!)
- hoping the memory will work
- hoping that the case connections don’t fail. (I think the front light is causing problems).
- will the Windows repair installation work? (I won’t really shed a tear if it doesn’t. I have my C drive completely backed up).
Will report in a day or two which of these gave me problems.
Related: I have reached the conclusion that you can never have too many USB hard drives.
Update: This experiment was a failure. Oh well!
Leave a Reply