It seems that the motherboard he ordered is the wrong voltage.
The machine is old in computer terms (7 years) and its hard to
find replacements. And it may be that another component may fail
soon.
In 2016 this hand-built multicore machine was not available in standard PC
shops. Today I went in to PC world and multicore is the norm now.
There are machines which exceed the spec on my old machine by 50%
but still value at £1500. To explain, the muticore aspect was important
in testing concurrent Shen which runs under SP. This machine allowed the
development of that technology.
Ebi, who built the machine, and myself are coming to the conclusion that
this machine has perhaps reached the end of its useful life and only the new
processor installed last month in it has value. It could easily fail again.
He's willing to deduct the cost of the processor
from any computer he sells and I may take this offer up to get a
multicore laptop. At the moment I'm running off a laptop plugged into
a desk monitor but it is a very old monocore (2009) and very slow.
So we should be up by the end of this week. I'm going into his shop on Wednesday.
The new machine will likely not have the performance of the old, but shy
of spending £1500 its hard to get a better one. The new one will serve adequately
though I will miss the water cooled monster with its steady blue light and
stomping processor.
Mark