A major power outage meant that the building had to be cleared (safety reasons — the emergency lighting only lasts a couple of hours and the emergency systems aren't operational during a power cut, so no one is allowed to be in the building after that unless they are the ones dealing with the power failure). Everyone has been told to phone in early tomorrow morning to find out whether to go back to work. I note, though, that most of the core systems are back up now so I guess they will want me in early to help turn everything back on. At least that means I have my email back.
Apparently the machine with the memory fault didn't have a faulty motherboard, but the 380XGL graphics card (whatever that is) has an incompatibility with the motherboard which makes memory slot 2 appear faulty. The vendors have apparently tried both Gigabyte and Asus motherboards with the same result.
We have another machine which is displaying memory faults so obscure that it takes Memtest86 24 hours or more to show anything. We switched the AGP card (Radeon 9200SE chipset but made by Asus) for a PCI graphics card and the faults went away. How very odd. What's more, my cow-orker tried flashing the BIOS to the most recent version and now the Lite-on DVDRW drive won't recognise CDs (though it will still read DVDs). I've found firmware for that drive, but it's supplied as a Win32 executable and this machine is Linux only. Hrmph.
Ah — email from the administrator: the power has been temporarily repaired but it is at half capacity so certain systems will not be running and there will be no heating. How nice. Anyway, they may be making a more permanent repair on Friday, which means more time off.