So, eventually, I did figure out what was wrong with my hardware.
It appears to have been nothing more than a horribly overheating processor, and thus, fixed by a simple application of some thermal paste. (65C = bad, generally)
On that note, I now have to decide what kind of upgrading I want to do, and whether or not I build a MythTV box (probably), but at least I can sit on it for a bit until prices drop as rumored in July.
The Intel wireless drivers are rather old, and seem to be less stable than the current development drivers.
I don’t really understand why the 1.0.0 driver went in, rather than the 1.0.6 driver, given that the 1.0.6 driver has been out for several months.
In any case, I put a vote in for a more current driver, on the kernel list. Now I wait.
I’ve been hand-building my IPW2200 drivers for a while, but as of today (maybe yesterday), the drivers are part of the main kernel tree.
This makes me very happy. My laptop is now fully functional from the mainline kernel. (Toshiba Satellite A55-[something])
Turns out I had a bum CPU. I’ve had the replacement running full out on distributed.net stuff for most of the week, it’s running around 50°Celsius, which is warm but not horrible, and it works just fine, so I’m happy.
I think I’ve pinpointed my hardware problems - running memtest86 overnight with all tests turned on got me a single error in the same spot as the ones I got when I had the ram swapped out.
That definitely makes me think “bad motherboard”, so it goes back to the store to get that replaced.
Wish me luck!
For the last several weeks I’ve been battling a series of failing hardware - seemingly a losing battle, as well.
Last weekend I got angry at the server I’ve been using to host my email and such for years (An ABIT-BP6 with Dual Celeron 466s in it.), so I went out and bought an Athlon 64, case, power supply, memory to use to replace something.
I ended up (after several failures at other ideas) replacing my gaming machine with that, and moving harddrives around in other hardware so that everything else works.
First, I have to reinstall Windows XP on it (not really sure why), then after I do that, it still has spontaneous crashes to deal with, which may have been related to the bad ram I had.
Now it appears the gaming machine has killed its harddrive. sigh
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