I finally had a some time to myself.. The children were fast asleep, my wife was snoring after a long day. Brian and Fernie were in the living room, waiting to be picked up. Then I thought, now would be the perfect time to work on the mythTV box.
I managed to bump up the CPU to 2500 instead of the 1800 it was at. Everything was running smoothly and a lot more quickly. The next step was to get the ram working in dual channel mode.
I put in the new ram chip I got at E-bay. Looking forward smooth, beautiful HD content, I put it in the correct slots. In a moment of anticipation, I flipped the switch.. and in a puff of smoke I knew…. I knew that it was all gone. There will be no HD hockey tonight. There will be no recorded yoga programs for my wife in the morning. There will be no “Music and the Spoken Word at 9:00AM (instead of 6:30 when it airs here in the west coast) this Sunday. I had fried the motherboard, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.
I looked at the general location where the smoke billowed originally. And there was the culprit: A bent capacitor that I had pushed just a little too far installing a third Hard Drive three years ago. I had bought this motherboard a month after we got married and it has lasted us a good seven years. It’s sad to see it go after it had served us first as our main computer, then as a secondary file server, then as the venerated MythTV PVR it once was.
So what will take it’s place? I’m eyeing an AMD dual core Motherboard this time around X2 variant. I’ll keep the Hard drives until they die. After all, didn’t Brigham Young say, “Wear them out or do without”? Hopefully they’re still functional. Then again, perhaps I should just get another cheap soltek socket A to take advantage of all this stuff, without having to buy a new system…. yeah… I think I’ll go that route instead.