What's the difference between.......

[breham]

.....booting a machine and start/shut down/restarting a machine?

I've got a machine which is a pig to boot up. It sometimes get's to the Manufacturers logo, sometimes to the windows 98 splash screen and then hangs (sometimes it doesn't even get that far).

Yet when it has loaded and I choose start/shutdown/restart it has no problem at all.

Are there any differences in the two methods that would point to the cause of the problem.

Many thanks
Brett

[mjc]

When you talk about booting you are referring to the intial time you apply the power button, right?

And then going the restart route, the power button is out of the eauqtion, the machine has been running for a while, right?

If you are getting hangs and freezes using the power button and it takes several reboots to get going it seems like a hardware problem, maybe a waek or dying power supply, an add-in card that is quite working correctly, memory that is flaky...etc.

Are you having any other errors?

What all is in your machine? CPU, drives, etc

What size is the power supply?

Some software causes could be improper shutdown, network card driver problems....

When was the last time you ran scandisk? (with surface scan...because a hard drive that is going out could casue boot problems)


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mjc
Links list:Computer Links (http://www.dreamwater.org/tech/mjc/index.htm)

Celts are the men that heaven made mad, For all their battles are merry and their songs are all sad.

[breham]

Hi mjc,

Thanks for your quick response.

Your assumptions are correct i.e. the difference is the power button. The machine is a compaq presario P233 with 48Mb RAM, Modem, CD-RW, 4Gb HDD and nothing else special really.

I ran a scandisk with surface scan about a week ago and found no problems.

Another thing I should add is that sometimes when it does want to boot is there is a message that comes up saying "Original configuration used - press f1 to continue or f10 for setup."

Hope this helps.
Brett

[mjc]

Ok looks like it is time for a new CMOS battery....make sure that you wrie down your BIOS settings before attempting to change it. Then open the case and look for a small battery the size of a coin...(about the size of a quarter), make sure the system is powered down and unplugged. then pull it out and read the number on it, get a replacement and pop it in, power up , enter the BIOS and use your written settings to reset it. Save and exit.


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mjc
Links list:Computer Links (http://www.dreamwater.org/tech/mjc/index.htm)

Celts are the men that heaven made mad, For all their battles are merry and their songs are all sad.