Richard's non-functioning computer, which I brought home from our last LUG meeting, has "fat capacitor" syndrome. There are four electrolytic capacitors on the motherboard which are clearly defective and others which may or may not be good. The machine is a 900 MHz Duron with 256 MB of PC133 RAM. At the moment he's using one of my machines which is a 900 MHz P3 with 384 MB of PC133 RAM so he's not taking too bad a hit in performance though my machine is running Mepis/KDE where he's used to using Ubuntu/Gnome.
It's possible that replacing the visibly defective components will fix the machine but the cooling fan on the video card is frozen so the card is probably bad and there may or may not be other problems. My inclination is to try and find him another, perhaps better machine or another motherboard, mainly because I know he's a gaming junkie. Right at the moment I don't have a better machine. Richard is in "extreme economy" mode for the next couple of months because he's saving up to make a down payment on another mobile home. He can't afford to buy hardware for the next month or two so 'll be "on the scrounge" for equipment. Meanwhile he can continue to use my machine.
Let me know if you have any hardware you're willing to pass on. If I can't scrounge or finagle a better machine for him within a few weeks I'll gift him the machine he's using now, max out it's ram, find a good video card for it and install his OS of choice on it.
Don ______________________________________________________________________________ Highland Lakes Linux User Group (HLLUG): http://www.hllug.org HLLUG mailing list: //www.freelists.org/list/hllug
