Issues, Yay!
My main computer is currently suffering from some issues. Well, that’s not entirely true. It’s been suffering for some months now. But it wasn’t until the last couple of days that it became completely un-usable.
At almost any point in time, pixels can been seen going across the screen. Pixels that shouldn’t be there. When I first start it up, the pixels are white. They seem to form in thick, non-solid, horizontal lines. Once Ubuntu had loaded, the pixels went from being white to random colours. This lead me to believe that it was my graphics card that was the issue.
Then over time, it got a little bit worse. The pixels were still there, but whenever there was text while booting, it would sometimes change the colour of individual letters. A little while later it was capitalizing them. And shortly after, it was changing them completely. By this point in time, I could no longer boot into Ubuntu. It would work until I got to the point where there should have been a login screen. Instead I was just getting a black screen, the monitors went into their power saving mode. So I decided to run a ram test.
This ram test isn’t turning out good. The text is all garbled, but I can make out most of the important stuff. Thankfully, I don’t have to be able to read text to be able to say that I probably need new ram. There’s alot of red, and if I assume that what it’s telling me is correct (which it might not be), then I have over 700 MB of ram that’s failed… That means that both my sticks of 512MB ram are gone.
I went downtown to pick some up, if I could find some for a reasonable price. It was going to cost my $60 for a 512MB stick, and $105 for a 1GB stick. This is a bit much for my tastes.
Tomorrow I’ll show my classmates some pictures of what my desktop is doing, and see what they think. Considering the prices of hardware from any store in my city, I’ll have to order some over the internet. I figure that it’ll probably take at least 2 weeks for me to get what I need. And then I’ll just have to hope that what I get fixes my problem.