tammis' neurospice

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2024-10-23: Maintenance on the Windows XP PC

One day not too long ago, I was going to upgrade the Ubuntu install that was installed on the Windows XP PC as a modern OS to do maintenance on from 22.04 LTS to 24.04 LTS. However, the machine refused to boot. I got the BIOS splash screen, but only a black screen after that regardless of whether I try to let it boot or try to interrupt the boot procedure to enter the BIOS setup or the boot menu. Alas, it was time for troubleshooting.

the PC with its side panel open and a multimeter — Here we go again...

The first order of business was a BIOS reset, which actually fixed the booting issue. However, I noticed a second issue, only one of the two GPU fans was spinning. Googling only yielded more confusion and contradictory statements as to whether that was a feature or an issue, so I decided to stress-test the GPU and see if the fan spun up under load.

However, I first run memtest86 with XMP on, because I felt like a RAM issue could've easily scrambled the BIOS. I found no issues.

I then went into Ubuntu and did the inline upgrade to 24.04. However, I kind of lost my temper when it said that some packages were only going to be available as snaps, and then the snap store tried and failed to update itself, because it was running because it was updating itself. Good grief, you already have a good package manager in apt, and flatpaks exist. Stop pushing this crap.

Soooo... I installed Debian 12 (with KDE Plasma). However, it turns out the GTX 680 is one generation too old to use the "current" nVidia drivers, and Debian stable only has that one version packaged. My short time messing around with Nouveau (the reverse-engineered FOSS drivers) was super annoying, as I found it surprisingly hard to get any temp sensor readings out of the card.

However, the system is a triple boot with XP and Windows 7, so I booted Windows 7 and brought Valley and Furmark 1 over with a USB stick (no internet connection for legacy systems like XP and 7, thanks). It turned out the GPU fan was indeed broken. I briefly looked at a fan replacement, but found a second GTX 680 (a Gigabyte OC model with a more high-end cooling system) used locally for 10 € and decided to go with that instead.

After installing the new old GPU and reinstalling the nVidia drivers under XP and Windows 7, everything was back in working condition. I stress-tested the new GPU, and all tests went fine.

I have said to my friends that retro computing is a trap. You hold onto obsolete crap and then are all surpised Pikachu face when it inevitably breaks. That being said, I got out of jail free here, because the failed component is not recent enough to not be worth much of anything but not old enough to be worth much of anything, either.