A week after

[mjc]

Well it has been a week now since my replacement got here from HP and those of you who know what was going on thanks. I thought that I would post back with a few observations about my new box.

1. Fan is much quieter.

2. Many fewer hangups and BSODs only one minor annoyance (Doc, it hurts when I do this...).

3. Runs much cooler.

4. Finally figured out how to partiton my HD so the HP restore disk still recognizes it as an HP. (Use a third party partition manager not fdisk)

So would anyone care to take a stab at explaining some of the differences?

My thoughts are that the fan in the old box never was running right and some of my common hangups were due to heat. Maybe also the power supply was a little flaky too, because I would run from about 490MHz to about 505Mhz (500MHz Celeron). This one seems to be much more stable all around. So all in all I'm pretty well satisfied with that part of HP support (warranty service but their phone staff for tech support does leave alot to be desired). The last thing is for a low end box it does get the job done. After the warranty is up I am going to make some "improvements" (transfer the whole thing over into a larger case etc.) as I work aon building my next system.

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mjc

PS: Sometimes it is the best thing to have other knowledgeable people just to bounce ideas off of and other times they are needed to help out with something that your just not getting, thanks, again.

[This message has been edited by mjc (edited 01-09-2001).]

[Paleo Pete]

Without looking up your previous post the details are a bit fuzzy, but I think you may be right, heat and flaky power supply. The older machine may have just had one of those flaky Windows installs from the start too, I'm sure you know how that goes...I've always been half convinced I have one right now, everything went fairly well, no error messages or anything, but the machine has always seemed a bit flaky since I last reinstalled. Nothing concrete to go on, just the way it feels.

The main difference is your machine was fairly new and I've had this machine running for 4 years, and have had 2 or 3 other solid installs, so I know what it should act like. This time it just doesn't quite seem right, nothing I can put my finger on, except a few IPF's the past month or so. No errors at all till then, and using the exact same apps I have used before, Zone Alarm being the only thing new. I seriously doubt ZA is the problem, the machine was giving me that feeling before I installed it.

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[mjc]

The thing is the old one had three seperate complete installs and it acted the same so I'm still leaning toward flaky power supply and heat. Maybe i should have sent it back in April '00 instead of waiting until now. It wasn't really bad though just downright annoying, until the fan got so noisy. The thing is I should have known something wasn't quite right, could have saved myself alot of aggravation. Oh, well hindsight......

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mjc