re: PC still rebooting.. bad RAM? New Chip/motherboard.
Saturday, February 14, 2004 at 10:44 am
Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by chester
(66 messages posted)
Ok that was quite descriptive. I have a couple of ideas that I will mull over for
a few minutes while I reread your story a couple of times, but the first thing that
comes to mind is a friend of mine bought his first PC, I put the whole thing together
for him in normal quality fashion. a few days after he had it, it started doing the
exact same thing. rebooting randomly. I really beat my head on the wall for awhile
before the wall gave me an idea. My education is in electronics, working as a repair
tech at the time I happened to own a shiny new $400 Fluke digital multimeter with
a logging function. so I hooked it up to the wall socket, and low and behold brownouts.
It is an undercurrent condition about the opposite of a power 'surge'. and probably
the cause of your capitors failing. The soulition a $65 power conditioner. Cheapist
thing you ever saw not bigger than a 20 pk of cds, but it solved the problem. This
is a no brainer. take the computer to someone elses house and see what happens. Like
I said I will give it some more thought, and I will post if I com up with anything.
Good luck
On Saturday, February 14, 2004 at 10:31 am, Pent wrote:
>OK... this has been going on for about a week.
>Last Friday my PC had a funny smell coming from it, but at the time nothing was
wrong
>with it. After I got home from work and booted the PC... right when the Loading
WinXP
>screen usually comes up it rebooted, and it kept rebooting at the same spot and
the
>smell started getting worse. So I asked a few people what the cause of it could
>be and they told me that more than likely it was my Power Supply (PSU), so I went
>out and bought a new PSU... got it home and after installing it the PC still rebooted
>at the same spot (once in a great while it would actually reboot to the scandisk
>screen and then when it started scanning it would reboot). Since I didnt think
it
>was the PSU anymore I installed my other PSU back. While installing it I noticed
>that I had leaky capcitors on my motherboard and they were very hot, so I automatically
>thought I had found the problem... I took the PSU back and swapped it out with
a
>new motherboard... After installing the board the PC STILL rebooted.
>So after that I only hooked up one HDD, my video card (GF4 ti4400), my DVD burner,
>modem, one DIMM of 512MB RAM... that seemed to do something for awhile, but after
>an hour it rebooted again...
>Once again I asked around and someone said that my processor(AthlonXP 2000+) might
>be going bad, so went into my BIOS and set the FSB to 100 and the PC booted fine,
>so I hooked up everything back like it was originally and as long as I kept the
100FSB
>set it didnt reboot.
>I ordered a new processor (AthlonXP 2700+) and got it in and installed it (yes,
I
>used thermal compound) and it ran fine til I realized that the FSB was still at
100FSB
>(which only gave me 1.2Ghz of clockspeed), so I set it to 133FSB and it ran fine
>at 1.7Ghz, so I then decided to take it to 166FSB to get the actual speed the chip
>was supposed to run at (2.17Ghz), BUT the speed actually went back down 1.2Ghz.
I
>checked to make sure my Vcore for the chip was at 1.65v and it was.. so I forced
>the 13x multiplier on the BIOS for the 166FSB... and the PC started to reboot again...
>so I took it back down to the default multiplier and 133FSB and it was running ok
>for one day... it just rebooted on me about an hour ago...
>I have tested the RAM with Memtest86 and had it do one pass.. there were NO errors.
>Since last Friday I have reformatted my C: drive at least 5 times because the rebooting
>is messing up the actual boot files and windows.
>I have no clue what is going on, but I seriously need help with it.
>I have a new motherboard and a new proceesor in it, so I doubt it could be either
>one of those... the PSU I tried did the same thing as the old PSU, so I exchanged
>the new one for the new motherboard.
>This is corrupting my other HDDs too...
>I formatted several different times with WinXP Pro with and without the SP1 pack...
>The only other constants are the video card, RAM(two DIMMs of 512MB RAM), and the
>modem (maybe something else I am overlooking), and like I said all of the RAM tests
>I have done came back with no errors.
>
>You think the RAM is bad? (no error during testing)
>
>A Virus maybe? (remember I have reformatted and hooked up a totally different HDD
>as the C: since this began)
>
>I seriously need help...
>Thanks, Pent
>
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