At this point, none of the desktop computers have made it through the move completely unscathed.
1. Katie’s desktop, when we set it up after moving, couldn’t open the CD/DVD tray. It tried, but after whirring for a few seconds, it would give up. Because of the way the case is set up, I had to open it up and pull out the drive in order to get at it with a paper-clip, manually open it, move it a couple of times, and blast the whole thing with compressed air.
2. The transmitter for the cordless mouse went on the shared Windows box. So we went down to Best Buy to get a new mouse. The next day I found the 10% off coupon I’d printed out when setting up mail forwarding with the post office.
3. My computer, after working fine for a week and a half, suddenly stopped displaying a desktop. Instead I got flickering rectangular fragments. I tried making the machine re-detect the card. No luck. Removed the brand-name NVIDIA driver in favor of the built-in open-source driver. Same. Ah, well. The card’s been flaky for a while — it stopped displaying normal 80×25 text mode sometime last year, so I’d made it use a higher-res mode instead — so I figured it had finally gone. No big deal, I thought, I had this spare card I’d pulled out of the Windows box 2 months ago. I could just pop that one in. Bzzt! I’d forgotten that the board was old enough that it had AGP, not PCI-Express. So I don’t actually have a spare card to try. I could get a new AGP video card, but AGP is obsolete. I’d be better off finally doing the mobo+processor+RAM upgrade I’ve been wanting to do since last fall, which means I have to make up my mind whether I’m ready to go 64-bit or not. I might be able to squeeze some more life out of the current hardware, since both Knoppix and the Fedora 9 installer are quite happy to display graphics (some driver must have gotten screwed up), so I started installing Fedora 9 before I left for work this morning. I’d been meaning to upgrade anyway.
Presumably the laptop’s fared okay so far because it’s designed to be moved around. Even so, I’m a little nervous about installing the latest OS update.
Update: Fedora 9 didn’t solve it. And it’s not the card, either — my boss let me borrow a video card to test it, and I swapped it in during lunch. (Oddly, the textmode problem was still present as well.) Also there was apparently an issue with the NVIDIA drivers and Fedora 9 that was cleared up with Wednesday’s updated driver. Without the fact that removing it entirely didn’t change anything, I’d have suspected that the new driver fixed F9 and broke F8.
On the plus side, dropping down to 1024×768 works. Unfortunately, since it’s an LCD monitor, non-native resolution = blurry.
Next course of action: Try running the Fedora 9 LiveCD (should be exactly the same drivers). If that doesn’t work, suffer through the blurry picture while researching new hardware. If it does work, try a fresh install instead of an upgrade. *grumble*