Yeah. Oh yeah. Every­thing else works fine, but the brand-name power sup­ply (AOpen) had to keel over and die. Admit­tedly, it was only a 235W in a sys­tem with two opti­cal dri­ves, two hard dri­ves, and a 1.8GHz proces­sor with 768MB of RAM (I just kept adding things to it with­out really think­ing about power til yes­ter­day, when the type of crash/hang I kept get­ting struck me as being a clas­sic power prob­lem), but… a web-cam?!

That’s ridicu­lous. But true.

Any­way, I’m plan­ning on vio­lat­ing (yet again — ser­ial offender, here) the “No user-serviceable parts” sticker on the now-dead power sup­ply so I can fix it to use it in another sys­tem. I swapped it out for some generic Happy Star Lucky For­tune Power thing (yeah, the name is par­o­dic… it mightn’t have to be, though!) I had lying around — only 250 watts, mind — and every­thing turned back on again.

Well, kinda. The web-cam still doesn’t work on this machine, but I’m inclined to think that’s Linux (kernel-level/modprobe crap) being screwy, and not hard­ware par­tic­u­larly. Might be power again, but I doubt it.

And the web-cam is fine. I tested it on a Win­dows box and was delighted with the rather-un-crappy qual­ity of it. Which you’d kinda expect see­ing as it does 1.3MP still images, but I digress. Fixed-focus, but the expo­sure auto-balance is pretty decent, so I’m happy. Good expo­sure capa­bil­i­ties are what make crappy cam­eras less crappy.

As for the hub-that-wasn’t-a-switch, well… it’s going back this after­noon, if the place is open. They open IT-shop-like hours (i.e. open late, close later :P), so I’ll head down after mid­day. Hope­fully I can just get a refund on the 3Com hub, because I don’t really need a new switch after all (though I want one that’s more solid + doesn’t make squeal­ing noises incessantly!).

Oh, yeah, pic­tures. Here’s the 3Com hub on the inside. Because I had to unplug the fans, which were grind­ing annoy­ingly (barely spin­ning), and because I make it a habit to open up any bit of sec­ond hand gear to check for… dust, insects, anthrax. What­ever. The real rea­son is geekery.

Note howit’s designed to read­ily accom­mo­date 24 ports. The 6 port model, reput­edly, also has the same design, though pre­sum­ably you’d need dif­fer­ent types of chips there (divide 12 by three then try and mul­ti­ply by a whole num­ber to get 6… you can’t). Any­way, it’s after 12… I’m off!