Solved!

It would appear that Ubuntu’s powernowd has problems with AMD Cool ‘n’ Quiet, at least on my Asus A8N-SLI Premium motherboard. Turning off Cool ‘n’ Quite (crap name) in the BIOS menu solves the problem where I’d be typing away and the machine would just freeze hard, to the extent that mouse-waggling had no effect. I’m really not used to Linux doing that to me: that’s Windows territory.

To be honest, though, I don’t have a terrific amount of confidence that the Asus A8N is a rock-solid motherboard. I’ve always used mostly Asus motherboards, and never had cause to complain. But this one’s always been a bit iffy. It “supports” 4 slots of DDR400 RAM, up to 1G each, but one of the BIOS revisions had a mysterious “update” feature which just said that if all four slots were populated with 1G DIMMs, it downgrades the RAM clock to 333Mhz. WHY? Presumably just because they’ve got problems they can’t resolve any other way. I think the next mobo will be a Tyan.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 20th, 2007 at 12:20 pm and is filed under geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.