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Computers have it in for me
Mar. 2nd, 2007 11:09 pmI have on my desk the replacement for the computer I bought at the start of the year which exploded three hours after purchase.
I've had it for not quite a week. It persistently crashes, apparently sometimes corrupting parts of the hard disc, when I give it certain fiddly disc-intensive calculations to do. Sometimes it crashes under other circumstances. Is Ubuntu 6.10 known to be this irredeemably unreliable on contemporary Intel hardware, or have I just received my second lemon in an order of two?
It's running memtest86 overnight, but no faults have shown up yet; I suspect this is a disc-controller rather than a memory issue, and no faults will show up. The last memory issue I had -- a module which had an unshakeable faith that every 1024th bit in the memory it presented had to be reported as zero whatever had been written to it -- showed up immediately in memtest86.
Is there a disc equivalent of memtest86? I'm prepared to take backups of everything - there's not much novel, I've only had the machine a week - and sacrifice the disc contents should the test need to be destructive, though I'd prefer something that sat in userspace and confined its merciless thrashing to the bits of the disc on which my data isn't.
I've had it for not quite a week. It persistently crashes, apparently sometimes corrupting parts of the hard disc, when I give it certain fiddly disc-intensive calculations to do. Sometimes it crashes under other circumstances. Is Ubuntu 6.10 known to be this irredeemably unreliable on contemporary Intel hardware, or have I just received my second lemon in an order of two?
It's running memtest86 overnight, but no faults have shown up yet; I suspect this is a disc-controller rather than a memory issue, and no faults will show up. The last memory issue I had -- a module which had an unshakeable faith that every 1024th bit in the memory it presented had to be reported as zero whatever had been written to it -- showed up immediately in memtest86.
Is there a disc equivalent of memtest86? I'm prepared to take backups of everything - there's not much novel, I've only had the machine a week - and sacrifice the disc contents should the test need to be destructive, though I'd prefer something that sat in userspace and confined its merciless thrashing to the bits of the disc on which my data isn't.
