Dead Computer Talking
Yesterday, I had a quick power glitch. Most computers in my office simply rebooted, but my new Asus A8V Athlon 64 system got stuck in a mode where the screen had a weird pattern on it and the PC started talking to me through the speaker system. It was saying something like “CPU failure” over and over in synthesized speech. This was somewhat disconcerting at first! The sound is straight off the motherboard, so it seems its a means of passing on status information to the user when the processor is totally cactus. Fortunately cold booting let it come up without hassles. The processor for the system is an Athlon 64 3500, but I’m looking forward to the time when an Athlon 64 X2 4800 level processor’s prices comes down from the stratosphere. Socket and Bios compatibility for the Athlon 64 series is very cool.