Hardware

An ASUS ROGSTRIX B450-F gaming motherboard that I have had been working perfectly fine for a year. Suddenly though, booting up the system resulted in the following message on the POST boot screen:

The system would shutdown and restarting would result in the same message. I couldn't get into the BIOS either as the del and F2 keys did nothing.

Do you have a USB keyboard? Does it work fine? Does it also work fine once you boot into your operating system? Does it not work at all during the boot process before loading your operating system?

If your answer is yes to all of the above, then you've very likely been an idiot like yours truly and enabled the Fast Boot feature in your Intel motherboard's BIOS without reading the fine print.

For the last few weeks, I've noticed weird red dots/lines or similar marks on my Kubuntu screen. I'd attributed them to a graphics issue that I'd recently sorted out, particularly because I was mainly noticing these marks when resuming the system from sleep mode. Turns out I was wrong. Very wrong.

While using Google Chrome on Kubuntu 14.10, the display hung for about 5 seconds before unfreezing with the following notification:

Once this began occurring with an increasing frequency, I began to do a little digging. Looking through /var/log/kern.log brought the following up:

So, I have this old Samsung monitor that has served me very well. It's 21" in size and I don't really need anything larger. Only problem is that it is a VGA monitor and uses a VGA cable. My new PC however deems VGA to be of the same archaicity as Morse code and has therefore not deigned to support it. There then I was, stuck with a wonderful monitor that could not be used due to a compatibility issue. Rather wasteful.

New Windows 7 system: When I plugged in my headphones into the front audio jack, I immediately started hearing a buzzing and whistling noise in the earpiece. When I switched to the rear audio port, this noise went away. MP3s played clearly on both ports albeit with the buzzing noise in the background when using the front port.

I got a new 3TB hard disk. While it's being detected in Windows 7, initializing it has proved to be impossible as I keep running into the following error:

The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error

After testing this one a couple of different systems and in Linux, I have arrived at the conclusion that the drive is screwed. Time to get it replaced.

One of my local servers died a quiet death last week. Much as I tried to revive the li'l bitch, she refused to accede to my plaintive entreaties. She is now consigned to a forlorn corner and I am yet to see to her last rites. In the meantime, I have recently introduced a new addition to my family of servers through the cannibalisation of older (and now retired) members of the same. So, I settled on trying to see if I could save the soul of my now recently defunct Kubuntu box by simply transferring its hard drive to this new server. When I tried to do so, this is what transpired:

Last week, I noticed that my computer was becoming really sluggish and the fans, extremely noisy. Seeing as to how I had an inkling that this was due to my CPU heating up or rather, not being cooled enough, and the fact that Windows wasn't telling me what the temperature was, I was in the hunt for a utility to report CPU temperatures in real time. I could, of course, check it via my BIOS. But I wanted a utility to be able to run under load.

Today, I purchased and installed the Edimax EW-7316Ug wireless 802.11b/g USB Adapter. While I usually approach the purchase of hardware for Linux - especially for non-mainstream products - with a certain degree of trepidation, I was heartened to note during my pre-purchase exercise that the Edimax page specifically mentioned Linux compatibility and even provided a source code download. How rare is that?!