Made an attempt at fixing the system today.
Since the board and CPU I have are over two years old, I thought I’d start there. I got a new MSI board and Athlon 2000 processor at PC Club in Monrovia. Brought it home. Put it together. The thing wouldn’t power on. The CPU fan twitched a bit, so I knew there was power, but it wouldn’t start. Back to the store and exchange the board. Bring the new board home. Same thing. So I get a new power supply from Best Buy. Now it powers on. I don’t know why, but what the hell.
So now the machine boots. But now Xwindows is broken. My old S3 video card can’t fit in the new AGP slot, so I have to use the built-in VGA card on the new board. Turns out that I need to upgrade Xfree86 to be able to use it. So I build a new X server from the ports collection, and then I fire it up. The monitor goes blank and says “OUT OF RANGE”.
So I spend a couple of hours tweaking the XF86Config file and searching with Google before I finally find the problem. I have to have ‘Option “Use BIOS” “off”‘ in the X config. I do this and now it works. And then the computer locks up hard.
The system locked up hard several times. At this point, the only original components in the system are the memory stick and the Linksys Ethernet card. I took out the Ethernet card and ran for a bit until it locked up again.
