On Sat, 7 Dec 2013, John R Pierce wrote: > geez, its a 10 year old pentium-4, and not even a late p4, a middle aged > 32bit-only one.... put it out of its misery, its been living on > borrowed time for the last 5 years. You mean since it was two? Even when I have income, I get annoyed about little mysteries that make things just not work. I do not have any income, so I also get annoyed at these little expenses that pop up occasionaly. Apparently just to annoy me. The symptoms have been changing. Instead of a black screen, after a crap out, I usually get a corduroy (sp?) pattern composed of different darknesses of one color. Sometimes pushing the reset button brings it back. Often I have to do a power-off. When I turn the power back on, the machine does not boot, the reset button still needs pressing. All this before I decided to do some dusting. Turning it one one last time before dusting, I noticed that the video card fan was not spinning. Whether that was a change or I'd been inobservant previously, I do not know. In light of previous comments about just moving dust around, the Dust-Off started at the top and moved down. It blew chunks out of the video card fan. The video card fan spins now, but symptoms have not changed since the dusting. I can only use CentOS for several minutes. F14 will usually last a lot longer. -- Michael hennebry at web.cs.ndsu.NoDak.edu "SCSI is NOT magic. There are *fundamental technical reasons* why it is necessary to sacrifice a young goat to your SCSI chain now and then." -- John Woods