Useful spare, whats yours?

Hagar · 4 Oct 2010 at 22:51

The most used spare part in my arsenal is a radeon 7000 PCI card, most motherboards still have at least one PCI but that may change.

It has been a loaner to friends while their PCI-E super card is RMA'd.

I have also used it to boot PC's for trouble shooting graphics.

It has been in more PC's than I can remember and with 32Mb on board it will display full res 2D on 1920 x 1080. It is also very robust, knocking around in my drawer with a bit of bubble wrap around it.

Doughnut007 · 4 Oct 2010 at 22:57

DUCT TAPE

VFM Addict · 4 Oct 2010 at 23:19

Agree 100%. Have a couple of PCI cards that have done similar duty to nkata's 7000. Wouldn't be without one.

I also keep an old car mechanics stethoscope about, great for really identifying where noise is really coming from.

Finally, and always in my pocket, a pendrive with both Puppy Linux on it and a full set of Windows Portable Apps including diagnostics. The Pup'n'Port pendrive is squeezed into a small pouch with a small multi-tool, so I've a hardware and software toolkit always to hand.

Cheers,
vfm

Infam0us · 4 Oct 2010 at 23:30

A spare Soundcard

SupermotoMX · 4 Oct 2010 at 23:32

i have a laptop, does that count? o.O

thingemajib · 4 Oct 2010 at 23:57

i have one of the original cartridge Athlons kicking around in the attic somewhere...

dabobmeister · 5 Oct 2010 at 00:34

lol I have an old p4 with mobo + ram + geforce 6600 that still comes out every couple of months to test one component or another when someone comes to me with a broken machine.

Rustyy · 5 Oct 2010 at 00:44

VFM Addict said:
Agree 100%. Have a couple of PCI cards that have done similar duty to nkata's 7000. Wouldn't be without one.

I also keep an old car mechanics stethoscope about, great for really identifying where noise is really coming from.

Finally, and always in my pocket, a pendrive with both Puppy Linux on it and a full set of Windows Portable Apps including diagnostics. The Pup'n'Port pendrive is squeezed into a small pouch with a small multi-tool, so I've a hardware and software toolkit always to hand.

Cheers,
vfm

This, sounds Sweet trust me more details?

VFM Addict · 5 Oct 2010 at 01:17

I guess you mean my Pup'n'Port pendrive.

A 2GB usb pendrive or more required really. Just download Puppy Linux and then install to the pendrive using Unetbootin or Linux Live Installer. (All can be googled for) Once that's done you'll have a pendrive that can boot into Puppy Linux on any any PC that can boot from a usb drive.

The Installers that install Puppy Linux format the drive to a standard FAT filesystem, so any Windows OS can read and write to it also. That means you can also install any Windows Portable Apps to it too. You can find lots of Portable Windows Apps at portableapps.com and portablefreeware.com.

Puppy Linux takes a little bit of getting used to, especially the file manager (Rox) but you'll very soon get use to it.

Don't worry if you don't like the initial look / colour and icon theme. You'll soon learn to get it looking any way you want.

I've used Puppy for a number of years now. Here's a link to how I had it looking in Version 4.13 and with the current Version 5 its even easier to make it look slick.

See - http://i431.photobucket.com/albums/qq34/vfmlondon/mypupusb.png

Cheers,
vfm