On Wed, 2020-05-13 at 16:42 +0800, Ed Greshko wrote: > But, unless there has been additional HW added to the system, the > additional slots would be empty. RAM. Power leads. Jumpers, at a stretch... RAM can be a surprising gotcha. I unknowningly had a system with bad RAM, that was apparently running fine. After an upgrade, the PC become wonky. We did a memory test and found it consisitently had a fault in a certain area. My guess would be that the prior install just happened to load something unimportant, or unused, in that area. And the next install made different use of RAM. After all, who would notice that maybe one bit was missing when playing audio, or one pixel in the bottom right of the screen was stuck, but one bit wrong in other computations could crash the system. I've seen systems where someone hadn't plugged the extra 4-pin power lead (which often goes to a graphics card, but can be to the motherboard). The computer did usually work fine, running off the power through the main connector. But under some stress, it failed. I had my first IBM clown PC built for me, and sent it back for being unreliable (could crash it changing some basic user preferences). They took it back, re-installed Windows 98 (it's that long ago), etc., and gave it back to me. Playing safe, I looked inside before powering on, only to see that they'd left the CPU fan completely unplugged. Since then, I've always built my own PCs. My biggest laugh when looking inside a notoriously wonky PC at the local school (same era), was finding that someone had sticky-taped an aspirin inside the chassis. We wondered if they thought it would help, or they expected that they'd need it the next time they had to work on it. -- uname -rsvp Linux 3.10.0-1127.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Mar 31 23:36:51 UTC 2020 x86_64 Boilerplate: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the mailing list. _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
