jante_oh
06-13-2001, 07:47 PM
Hope someone can give me an expert opinion on this one:
A friend of mine recently gave me a computer 2 or 3 years old (Celeron 400, 32 Megs of RAM with functional video, sound and modem cards—built for her by another friend) that was giving her such trouble that she (a total neophyte) scrapped it for a new one and wanted nothing more to do with it. I took it because I thought, heck, I’m not afraid to open the box, and I can replace memory and easy stuff like that, even installed a hard drive once, so maybe I’ll be able to get it to come back to life and have a nearly free computer http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/wink.gif
Guess I should have known, nothing is ever free. Anyway, here’s the story of my struggles with this machine, which has become quite the little thorn in my side, due to curiosity, mostly.
First of all, my friend claimed that it would not boot, no matter what, and that she had tried on numerous occasions to no avail. It was dead, she said. Well, I opened up the box and made sure everything was connected securely, and then I tried to get it to boot. Nothing. The fans would come on, and the hard drive sounded like it was spinning up, but no video and no post. I kept trying, though, and eventually, on the 25th or so try, voila! it booted. I got one beep on post, and having read that that might indicate a memory problem in an Award Bios, I replaced the memory. Now it has 64 megs of ram.
But the system would freeze after only an hour or two of working. I could only get it to boot up about every 4th or 5th time, but when it did boot, I wiped the hard drive, which was a mess, and reinstalled windows, then I reset the cpu to 366 mhz. That seemed to help (though it might not have), because it didn’t crash for several hours. I also got no more beep on post for the next few posts. I installed other software. It was fine for several hours again. And then it froze again. And then again and again. It basically won’t work for more than an hour at a time now. But it does boot up about 3 times out of 5 when you turn it on, now. Once it just shut off completely and restarted itself out of the blue, and once the screen went blank with nothing but a cursor, but most of the time, it just plain freezes and neither control alt+alt+del nor the reset button will not reset it. It has to be turned off on the back of the machine.
I figured, hey, it must be the power supply. So I bought a new one and put it in. No change. Fans ran and no boot. Then, boot but freeze. I took the power supply back, though I probably shouldn’t have, because I think it could be a combination of problems. Of course it could also be a bad motherboard, right? I looked at the motherboard and did not see any obvious damage, though. And resetting the cpu did seem to help, though that might just be a coincidence.
Anyway, do you think I am looking at replacing the cpu? Or am I more likely looking at an altogether bad motherboard? I think I could swing replacing the cpu, but otherwise, I guess I’d be looking at scavenging the components and putting them in another system, which I’m not sure I want to bother with, except for the new memory. Not sure what to do next. Any advice would be appreciated.
A friend of mine recently gave me a computer 2 or 3 years old (Celeron 400, 32 Megs of RAM with functional video, sound and modem cards—built for her by another friend) that was giving her such trouble that she (a total neophyte) scrapped it for a new one and wanted nothing more to do with it. I took it because I thought, heck, I’m not afraid to open the box, and I can replace memory and easy stuff like that, even installed a hard drive once, so maybe I’ll be able to get it to come back to life and have a nearly free computer http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/wink.gif
Guess I should have known, nothing is ever free. Anyway, here’s the story of my struggles with this machine, which has become quite the little thorn in my side, due to curiosity, mostly.
First of all, my friend claimed that it would not boot, no matter what, and that she had tried on numerous occasions to no avail. It was dead, she said. Well, I opened up the box and made sure everything was connected securely, and then I tried to get it to boot. Nothing. The fans would come on, and the hard drive sounded like it was spinning up, but no video and no post. I kept trying, though, and eventually, on the 25th or so try, voila! it booted. I got one beep on post, and having read that that might indicate a memory problem in an Award Bios, I replaced the memory. Now it has 64 megs of ram.
But the system would freeze after only an hour or two of working. I could only get it to boot up about every 4th or 5th time, but when it did boot, I wiped the hard drive, which was a mess, and reinstalled windows, then I reset the cpu to 366 mhz. That seemed to help (though it might not have), because it didn’t crash for several hours. I also got no more beep on post for the next few posts. I installed other software. It was fine for several hours again. And then it froze again. And then again and again. It basically won’t work for more than an hour at a time now. But it does boot up about 3 times out of 5 when you turn it on, now. Once it just shut off completely and restarted itself out of the blue, and once the screen went blank with nothing but a cursor, but most of the time, it just plain freezes and neither control alt+alt+del nor the reset button will not reset it. It has to be turned off on the back of the machine.
I figured, hey, it must be the power supply. So I bought a new one and put it in. No change. Fans ran and no boot. Then, boot but freeze. I took the power supply back, though I probably shouldn’t have, because I think it could be a combination of problems. Of course it could also be a bad motherboard, right? I looked at the motherboard and did not see any obvious damage, though. And resetting the cpu did seem to help, though that might just be a coincidence.
Anyway, do you think I am looking at replacing the cpu? Or am I more likely looking at an altogether bad motherboard? I think I could swing replacing the cpu, but otherwise, I guess I’d be looking at scavenging the components and putting them in another system, which I’m not sure I want to bother with, except for the new memory. Not sure what to do next. Any advice would be appreciated.