I’ve been meaning to put together another computer for a while now to play with some of the windows technology that I haven’t played with (active directory, exchange, project server, IIS, sql server, etc). Last weekend I cobbled together a xp1700 system from spare parts and assembled it on the desk. Ran an install and…. BSOD. Bleah. Threw a Ubuntu CD in there and it booted up fine. Hmm…. Threw a Gentoo CD in there and booted up MemTest86 (site down, linking to way back machine). Within about 5 minutes of testing the screen was red with memory errors.
Crap. New RAM too.
Last night, inbetween taking chunks from the current consulting project I’m working on and ripped out the motherboard that was in there and replaced it with another spare one of the exact same type just in case it was a hardware error. Of course, I didn’t want to put the system back together if it was just going to fail, so I did the same thing I did for naked and left it all hanging out. Hard drive on the desk, CDROM in sideways, motherboard sitting on top of a motherboard box sitting on top of a ripped apart case, cables everywhere… Lots of fun.
Anyway, left it running for about 10 hours with no errors. Next step, rip out DVD drive from my linux box so I can install SBS 2003 or W2k3 or whatever is available.