my home media sep revolves around a PC I have stashed in the loft. It's got a 1Tb USB drive with music and video on it. It's available
24/7, so can be set to download things, and we don't have to put up with the racket of a PC next to the TV. Eventually, I'd like it to act as an telephone recorder, and maybe a CCTV recorder ....However, I am now on my 3rd PC ... despite me comprehensively soak testing them, before putting them up in the loft, it seems after 2-3 months, they become somehow unreliable, and just lock up. I have a remote-control power switch, which I flip, they restart and can run for quite a while (1 week+) before locking up again.
My last one went up with a UPS ... (which was actually needed as we had a few brief power outages over 12 hours) so it should have a fairly clean power feed. I have based the systems around Ubuntu, and used different versions (started with 8.10 and am now on 10.04). Each machine has been different, built up from whatever I had around.
When finally change the machine, the "faulty" one gets re soak tested, but seems to fly ... I run various stress tests (using the "stress" utility) which have killed many iffy machines.
So I'm left with the suggestion there is something environmental about putting the PC in the loft. It's chilly up there, so it's unlikely to be *over*heating. Even in the height of summer, the CPU temperature was running at about 70C. Loft is dry. The router next to the PC has stayed up for months now ...
Anyone any ideas ?