Shortlog - a log of everyday things

2011-04-25

I woke up this morning around 08:00 to the deafening sound of silence. Most ordinary people would enjoy the peace and quiet, but even in my pre-alarm stupor, I knew that something was wrong. See, I leave my computer on 24/7, and if it's silent in my room, that means my computer isn't running. And when my computer isn't running, I have a problem.

I rolled over and saw the power light on the front of the tower blinking amber. An SMS on my phone from my system monitoring solution confirmed "kraken is DOWN." (Yes, I name my systems after mythological creatures.) A look at the repair manual (good thing I've got phoenix, my laptop!) told me this means "The computer is receiving electrical power, but an internal power problem might exist."

I opened up the case, and after a brief bit of looking around, found this:

That's a blown capacitor on the motherboard (the one with the golden stipe); while the lighting is nothing great, you can see the top is not uniformly the same color as the rest of the capacitors.

kraken has served me well (and nearly constantly) for 7 years now, so it's not like this is terribly surprising. Nor is it a particularly damaging failure - my disks are perfectly fine, and my data is backed up to phoenix anyhow. It is, however, a nuisance to deal with this time of year.

If I had a comparable capacitor on hand, I might try soldering a new one in its place, but 2200μF at 6.3V capacitors are a part neither I nor the BiD lab have lying around.

So, after 7 years of excellent use, it is time for me to get a new computer. I'm still deciding what to get, and would appreciate suggestions of:

• Cases. I'm looking for something quiet, not too heavy, and easy to work inside. Due to the way I use my desktop, I do not want/need tons of shiny bright lights - these would make it harder to sleep at night.
• Power supplies. SATA power is a must
• Motherboards. I need at least 4 SATA ports and at least one IDE channel. Dual gigabit NICs would be excellent, but I have a PCI-e 1x gigabit ethernet card already if not. Plenty of PCI slots would also be excellent, since I have an ath5k wireless card and a sound card as well, though I don't mind dropping the soundcard if the onboard audio is better anyway (which, frankly, it should be).
• CPUs. Something that could potentially last me about as long as this P4 did. Hardware virtualization extensions required. I'm open to both AMD or Intel offerings, but appreciate justification of suggestions from either side.

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