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General discussion

Driving me mad

Oct 17, 2004 12:28AM PDT

My Dad's PC is driving me (and him) absolutey mad.It's a Gigabyte GA71XE-4 with a Atlon Thunderbird (850) and 576MB RAM. It also has a Hercules Prophet 8500LE, A 20GB Maxtor and it's in A modded case. Basically everytime the PC is booted up, it crashes on the XP splash screen, I think it's at the Hardware detection part (Where the optical mouse and keyboard flash). It used to require turn off from the plug, and after restart would load windows normally, but now it does it twice, allways following the Same pattern, I have tried re-installing windows many times but to no avail, what shall I do, Most parts of the PC are 5+ Years old so I would not be suprised if something is not working, But what?

Discussion is locked

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Re: Driving me mad
Oct 17, 2004 12:36AM PDT

".It's a Gigabyte GA71XE-4 with a Atlon Thunderbird (850) and 576MB RAM. It also has a Hercules Prophet 8500LE, A 20GB Maxtor and it's in A modded case." and... "Most parts of the PC are 5+ Years old so I would not be suprised if something is not working, But what?"

The old Athlons created headaches even years ago with the way the CPU would take giant gulps of power. The power supplies had to be updated. An aging supply could be the cause. Since it's under the 1GHz mark, any 350 Watt supply will do. Could be under 20 bucks to remove this from the issues list.

Bob

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Possibilities: Heat, due to dead or clogged fans,
Oct 17, 2004 12:38AM PDT

Open the case and look and clean out.

Bad capacitors, the large ones located in the vicinity of the CPU, look for puffed up ones or leaky goo around the bottom of the caps. The vintage of your machine is a candidate for this one.

Power Supply going bad.

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Re: Possibilities: Heat, due to dead or clogged fans,
Oct 17, 2004 1:45AM PDT

No, It can't be any of these things, i have tried several PSU's, and the current is for a Pentium 4, so there should be no problems there, and the case has 4 Case fans and a better than stock Fan/heasink, so my CPU is only 40oc, I was given an Idea about Hard disk rotation speed, any more ideas? No leaks capacitors e.t.c

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Yes it can still be that.
Oct 17, 2004 1:50AM PDT

The Athlon 800 is well known to me and you never revealed the models of power supplies you fitted. My bet is they were all 300 or less Watts.

In closing, you need to run this memory test.

http://www.memtest86.com

What failures do you find?

Bob

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Likely not ap[plicable,, but if the newer PS's
Oct 17, 2004 2:21AM PDT

have two separate 12 Volt rails one is wasted ]so is its power capacity] in that system because the mobo regulators get fed from 3.3 volts. There's no place to plug in the 4 pin 12 volt connector.

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Re: Driving me mad
Oct 17, 2004 2:16AM PDT

psions

Along with the other suggestions.

More than one memory chip?
Run Memory test provided and reduce to one chip.

Un-plug all devices and remove cards.

Check BIOS for up-date.

Run Mnf diagonstic on HDD.


"I have tried re-installing windows many times but to no avail, what shall I do," you can do this till the cows come home... won't do you any good till the bad hardware is found.

Bill

http://home.t-online.de/home/toni.goeller/idiom_wm/id633.htm

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Re: Driving me mad
Oct 17, 2004 2:57AM PDT

I will have to wait till I am back at my parent huse then I will do the memory test, and post the results.

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Re: Driving me mad
Oct 17, 2004 11:37PM PDT

Ran into a Problem, His PC doesen't have a Floppy drive, I never really thought it would ever be needed, the age of the floppy is over really, though some may disagree, are there any other programs/alternatives to Memtest 86?

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Re: Driving me mad
Oct 18, 2004 12:46AM PDT