going in (stealth install!)

[Fenris_rising]

hi all

my stepsons friends PC fell over big time and its been passed to me to
sort out. major hardware failure of his keyboard is a minor problem and his XP OS seems to have corrupted very badly. so ive reinstalled XP and having
found the drivers for the mainboard its currently updating itself. Then im going to install Ubuntu 8.04, hehehehehe, within windows. i was able to show him compiz in action last night and the 4 virtual desktops. i think he was impressed. the PC is an emachine 420 the mainboard is an AsrockP4VM890 with 2.6Ghz intel celeron cpu. 256meg ram 80GB IDE onboard graphics and sound, via chipset. sound like a good candidate? seeing as the ram is shared with the onboard graphics i think he may as well get 1M installed (theres only 2 slots) or 2M max.Any thoughts as to any other beneficial changes i can suggest to his PC?
...........i know, but apart from removing XP :lolflag::lolflag:

[zvacet]

You have to add more ram if you want that your friend will be able to use compiz.Check video card because I have via one and I was never happy with it.Search forums for that and if you find answer for graphic card I think that´s it.Maybe I missed something so anybody feel free to correct me.

[Fenris_rising]

thanks for that. im going to tweak it all and get it running as best as possible with his current hardware. the board has a PCIE slot so i will advise him as to what he needs to get the best out of his system.
btw i tried a spare keyboard, as his was stuffed, and it would type 2 letters per single press of a key, it made no difference how fast you tapped the key, infact it seemed to do one letter on the down stroke and the second occured when the key was released. this obviously made it difficult to do anything. now the strange thing is the same keyboard is fine on my PC and my own keyboard that i am using to set his PC up is fine on his. i am sure its nothing to do with the settings of the keyboard within the OS as has been proved by simply swapping keyboards over so can anyone throw some light on why this happened please. this was happening under XP pro if thats relevant. i have also installed firefox and thunderbird into xp as his primary browser and email client. he is very pleased at the news that ive duel booted his PC and im currently letting sisoft sandra thrash it to check for any hardware or software problems as it is unclear what originally went wrong.

well it all seems ok so far its been running nice and stable (ubuntu that is) the only thing that needs doing is using ndiswrapper to get the usb wireless adapter funtioning at its max. other than that no problems. £90 pounds will get him a 320GB HDD, 128M radeon X300 GPU and 1M of DDR400 ram. fingers crossed for a convert.

[Fenris_rising]

hi all
well the PC is sorted out came back today. set it up yesterday, got them online in XP and Hardy 8.04. no problems at all. however this morning it failed to initialise the mouse and keyboard. in fact neither the mouse or keyboard will function with any other PC. also the belkin USB wireless adapter no longer functions similarly to. ok gentle persons heres the question. is the motherboard stuffed and its passed voltage/current to these peripherals and would this indicate a problem with the PSU as well????