My Shuttle romancandled last night – looked and sounded like a cluster bomb lashing a hillside – and so I need a new barebones PC. I’m hoping (but not hopeful) that the memory and CPU (AMD Athlon) can be salvaged.
I specifically want one of these:
usa.asus.com/products/desktop/te … erview.htm
taiwan.asus.com.tw/products/desk … erview.htm
Does anyone KNOW of a SPECIFIC shop that has them or will order them? Please DON’T say “try Nova!” or “try Guanghua!”, because I already have, and NONE of the places I wandered through (many of which have Asus T-2P and T-2R (Intel CPU) machines sitting around) will admit to having ever even heard of the AMD Athlon variant.
By the way, yes, these are physically available already (at least in the U.S.), and have been for months.
Many thanks!
If I were you, I’ll try to find out exactly which component of your Shuttle PC died before making any new purchases. If mainborad is the only thing that’s burned out then that’s all you need to RMA or replace. Call up newegg for directions, or call up Shuttle directly to see what they can do about it,. Even if they won’t RMA the parts for you, you can still just buy another Small Form Factor motherbourd and replace it yourself.
Although this isn’t the answer to the question you asked, one thing that can cause a PC to “roman candle” is a nasty power surge. A rather useful thing to have is a UPS, which can help prevent this, as well as protect you from power outages. Here in the jungles of Taitung County, power surges and outages are the norm, so my UPS has earned its stripes. So no matter what you do to repair your PC, you might want to also shop for a UPS (assuming, of course, that you don’t already have one). I picked up a nice one for NT$900.
regards,
Robert
“If you want to travel around the world and be invited to speak at a lot of different places, just write a Unix operating system.”
– Linus Torvalds
If the 20 or 30 dealers you surely spoke with already (in Chinese or Taiwanese) don’t have the answer, then well, the odds don’t look good that someone here does.
As someone advised, find out which parts are fried. If you can’t get the component here, order it from overseas.
And YES get a UPS. Mine went south some time ago. Been meaning to get a new one. 
Thanks all, problem is, I didn’t particularly want to wait two months to get the RMA and warranty work done. Magically, I found that the Terminator is suddenly here at Nova – first shop as I walked in. Unfortunately, I found out (by opening the box once I got it home) that in Taiwan, they don’t include the Asus 52X CD-ROM drive with the unit, so instead of getting the thing for a screaming-deal “only 15% more than in the U.S.!!!”, I got ripped off to the tune of “50% more than in the U.S.”.
Moral of the story: don’t buy anything here, buy it in the U.S. and drag it back in your suitcase. Sigh. Damn. I wish the Shuttle had waited another month to fry itself.