I was recently given a computer.

It had been bought for someone to use as their office machine, and because they wanted something that would run easily and quietly they sourced a nice machine with highish spec.

Mistake.

What they got was an over-pumped games machine, high spec MoBo + Intel CPU + colossal heat sink/fan, modular power supply, HUGE graphics card, expensive memory, 1TB HDD (this was 2 years back when that was higher end) and a nice coolermaster case. It was too noisy to use in the office because of all the fans and cooling needed, so it was bunged in the lab to run a couple of instruments.

Fine, until the air con was turned off over a hot weekend while the computer was still running.

One Monday it wouldn't wake up, so after some fiddling it was 'dumped' with a dead MoBo.

And it truly is dead. The power supply obviously 'works' because the LEDs on the board light up, but it won't post - Ben's not had time yet to pop the processor into his (socket 775) MoBo, but while the bits were sat around I thought it would be handy to use them. The DVD drive is a nice LG SATA unit, but distinctly dodgy, sometimes refusing to recognise the presence of a disc. I got 7 days out of the HDD before it refused to initialise.

But THAT isn't so bad.

A quick check on Seagate's website show it was still in warranty. So for £3 postage I should shortly get a brand new 1TB drive, which is VERY welcome news. Hope it's one of their more recent designs and not like-for-like.

As for me, I'm just about to go delete some files on a spare hard drive to create enough space to install another OS in order to try to rescue my data from the upgrade/crash of 2 weeks ago.

*edit*
Just popped the graphics card - an ASUS ATI 4850 - in there. THAT was the source of all the noise, as the huge fan runs flat out all the time, creating an absolute storm in the case. Quite quite ridiculous. My old Nvidia 7900 isn't a great deal less powerful, and is silent by comparison.

One more thing - there's every chance that I'll be able to recover my Sabayon drive, thanks to a handy facility for restoring the bootloader that comes on the live DVD.