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General discussion

Only the brainy ones should read this Motherboard ??

Nov 6, 2004 10:25PM PST

Hi There everyone I wonder if there is anybody out there brainy enough to help my freind has a old pc pentium 333Mhz with 64mb ram and running windows 98 that keeps freezing on him. I have done the usual scandisk defrag and even a full reformat and reinstall. So in my infinite wisdom I bought a motherboard tester to see if there was anything wrong with the motherboard. It has come up with two errors in the testing first one says "System booting. This means that the BIOS already passed control to the operation system. If no error flags sucha as memory size are set, boot via INT 19-Load system from drive A, then C; display error message if corect boot device not found. Boot system"
Error message Two "Test 8259 functionality. Test stuck NON-Maskable Interrupt bits(Parity/I/Ocheck);Verify NMI can be cleared. 8259 Interupt controller, channel 1 mask bits test." Ther trouble is I don't fully understand what it is telling me and if it can be corrected or not.Thats it boys and girls now the wait comes to see if I get any replies. Thanks to anyone who tries to reply to this message. Kindest Regards Tony B.

Discussion is locked

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Re: Only the brainy ones should read this Motherboard ??
Nov 6, 2004 11:18PM PST

Can't speculate much on the tester stuff.....but W98 barely crawls on 64MB and works way better with double that much RAM.

Usual causes for lockups are video card issues....there may not be enough memory to run windows and keep the video stable and a temp fix for this is to go to Control Panel\System\Performance\Grahpics and move the slider down a notch or two and reboot and see if that helps straight it out while you finish trouble shooting.

You might need a new video card, or newer drivers for what's installed, or just flat out more RAM to accommodate the hardware so everything plays nice together.

You might also have a heat problem going on.....make sure all fans are clean inside, including the one on the CPU. You could also have a Power Supply on its last legs....you can look at the label on the power supply and if it's 250W or less, seriously be looking to replace it with one 350W or higher.

TONI

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It doesn't seem that what you
Nov 7, 2004 12:47AM PST

call the first "error" message is such. It is simply describing the boot process and says to post a message if it doesn't find an Operating System on the floppy or C. I see nothing wrong with that, assuming that the system does boot. Your post seems to imply that the system boots but has problems running well.

As Toni says 68 MB is fairly light for Win 98, BUT have you exhusted the normal problems from modern times such as spyware, trojans et al? So many more things to cause such performance problems than exotic stuff needing a system tester.

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Re: It doesn't seem that what you
Nov 7, 2004 1:20AM PST

I have done the usual scandisk defrag and even a full reformat and reinstall.Lol not one of the brainey ones
but from what you say here it seems to me that the memory and bios ok if you can do a format and full install.Computer is old maybe just need a good cleaning to get rid of dust bunnies that are causing heat problems.Also if that not the problem I would try a new power supply.

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I'm posting this from an over six year
Nov 7, 2004 2:06AM PST

old computer. Got it as a 233 four years later remembered that it could support 333, so I got one very cheap and put it in.

I have a new one that I built with XP Pro but still prefer to use this one.

Of course, I am using 196 MB of memory.

What mobo is it?? Mine is an ASUS P2L97.

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Re: I'm posting this from an over six year
Nov 7, 2004 9:33AM PST

Dont know how old this computer is but its a Dell optiplex gxmt 5133 which is 133mhz says designed for win 95.Has integrated sound video and enternet,1g hd and 32megs of ram running win 98se.No trouble surfing or getting e-mail.Only trouble is with video clips,too jumpy but increasing to 128 megs of ram dont help that any,suspect its the onboard video.Ram was very expensive 3 or 4 years ago and I rember computers with win98se being sold with only 32megs ram.I used it for awhile and thought it great to get 64.My memory is still good for a great granpa.

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You could definitely use a
Nov 7, 2004 10:39AM PST

better video card, especially if your video is onboard. If so, remember that onboard memory uses memory from the regular bunch of RAM.

This computer was one of the earliest to have an AGP slot for video, but I have never been able to get a VGA card to work in it.

Before you get a new card you MUST check to see if you have an AGP slot, If not you must use a PCI type.

Even then when you are looking at video, best to not have the system doing anything else.

I use 196 MB and am older than you. LOL

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In your first post you said
Nov 7, 2004 12:05PM PST

that it was a 333. We have an old 200 MHz non MMX at work that is running Win 98 and is slow as hades, but with a 16 MB video card it has good video.

If it is a 133 it is very unlikely that it will have an AGP slot. Get a PCI video card with as much memory that you can get, probably a max of 32 MB for that computer. Anything higher might not work with the power supply.