The Dallemagnes → October, 2008

Video Card Troubles

So I spent the day yesterday Trying to decided what to do about my video card (Nvidia 8500 GT), apparently it came with a dud and the warranty has just expired(I only bought this computer last February). But I regress, let me back up a bit.

My Computer started acting kinda funky, then I had a freeze, so I did a hard shut down (with the power button) but then it wouldn’t turn back on, Well it did but wouldn’t get past the BIOS screen. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out what the hell was wrong. I tried resetting the RAM and nothing, so then I decided too have a look at pulling the T.V. out of the port (which isn’t supported by Linux anyway) and nothing, the comp still would not start. As a last resort I decided to reset the video card and that’s when I discovered it. The fan had completely broken. I mean it was still sitting on the mount but there is no way that bad boy was gonna spin ever again. At first I tried just leaving the side off and running an external fan over it as a temporary solution until I can afford to get a new one. Well that was not happening, the computer still didn’t want to boot up. Well this computer, didn’t come with an on board video card so without a card to replace it, the computer is useless. In the end I pulled the Nvidia 7300 GT of my sons computer as a temporary solution, leaving him with the On Board Nvidia 6100 (It really kinda sucks for his gaming), and put it into my computer. Once I put in the card the computer booted right up with no problem.

Well after my experience with that you would think I would be ready to walk away from the computer for the day, but then I had one other thing I wanted to do. When I initially installed Ubuntu Everything was on the same hard drive space, well having heard how Distro upgrades tend to break I decided that I wanted use a separate partition for my home folder. So wanting a clean slate I just decided to back up and do a fresh install then create the partition. Everything on that side went pretty smooth as I followed Aysiu’s tutorial at his website. The one issue I did have is that after rebooting and Logging back In I received this error:

User's $HOME/.dmrc file is being ignored. This prevents the default sessin and language from being saved. File should be owned by user and have 644 permissions. User's $HOME directory must be owned by user and not writable by other users

So I googled it on my hubbys computer and came up with THIS post. Since gnome wouldn’t load I did a ctrl+alt f1 and dropped to shell to run the commands. Then I did

shutdown -r now

To reboot and everything has been running fine since. So that’s the story of my adventure for the day…lol

Hardware Issues (Nvidia 8500 GT)

So I spent the day yesterday Trying to decided what to do about my video card (Nvidia 8500 GT), apparently it came with a dud and the warranty has just expired(I only bought this computer last February). But I regress, let me back up a bit.

My Computer started acting kinda funky, then I had a freeze, so I did a hard shut down (with the power button) but then it wouldn’t turn back on, Well it did but wouldn’t get past the BIOS screen. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out what the hell was wrong. I tried reseating the RAM and nothing, so then I decided too have a look at pulling the T.V. out of the port (which isn’t supported by Linux anyway) and nothing, the comp still would not start. As a last resort I decided to reseat the video card and that’s when I discovered it.

The fan had completely broken. I mean it was still sitting on the mount but there is no way that bad boy was gonna spin ever again. At first I tried just leaving the side off and running an external fan over it as a temporary solution until I can afford to get a new one. Well that was not happening, the computer still didn’t want to boot up. Well this computer, didn’t come with an on board video card so without a card to replace it, the computer is useless. In the end I pulled the Nvidia 7300 GT of my sons computer as a temporary solution, leaving him with the On Board Nvidia 6100 (It really kinda sucks for his gaming), and put it into my computer. Once I put in the card the computer booted right up with no problem.