I mentioned a few days ago that my Asus S-presso PC quit working.

Last night, I opened up and did a bit of surgery in a failed attempt to revive it. I had been thinking that the power supply died, since none of the fans spin up. However, when I opened it up, I could see that the Power LED on the motherboard lights up when the power supply is plugged in. So the power supply is not completely dead, though it’s still possible that it’s not supplying all of the various voltages that a modern PC needs. Or it could be that the power supply is fine and the motherboard is the culprit. I unplugged and reseated various connections including the two connections from the power supply to the motherboard and I also pulled the massive CPU heat sink/fan off and made sure that the Pentium 4 processor wasn’t a molten mass of silicon before cleaning up tons of dust in the fan and heat sink and reinstalling it. No fried processors or capacitors that I could see or smell, so I put it back together and stuck it in the garage for the time being.

My thought is that I may not even need this little Linux PC anymore, since I have:

• Samsung ML-2571N networked laser printer – I no longer need a server to expose my printer to the network.
• Linksys NSLU2 (running Unslung) – Provides access to my external hard drives and provide miscellaneous server niceties like acting as an SSH proxy and firefly/mt-daapd (iTunes server) and byrequest (TiVo HMO server) if I so choose. Basically a tiny little Linux server that takes up almost no space and uses a fraction of the power of a bona fide PC.
• DreamHost web hosting account – Hosts this web site and also hosts a Subversion repository that I use for a few miscellaneous things.
• MacBook Pro – Since I have VMware Fusion (and 4 GB of RAM), I can do just about any miscellaneous playing around on this machine – Mac stuff, Windows stuff, Linux stuff, FreeBSD stuff.

So my thought is that there’s not too much point in trying too hard to resurrect this little Linux box or buying a new rig to replace it. In fact, by not having this box, I could save a bit of electricity and improve aesthetics by getting rid of the long, ugly Ethernet cable that is running around the room (never got around to running it under the carpet). So perhaps I’ll just sell this PC for parts.