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What am I missing with this PC problem?
A friend has this PC that is working perfectly fine. Asrock VM800, Sempron 3000+, Maxtor 200GB, Linksys PCI WiFi adaptor, 512MB PC3200, XP Pro. The drive was partitioned 160/40 and a previous 20GB drive was in there as slave.
Turned out the OS s/n was wrong (ahem!), and there was evidence of a virus, so I reformatted C:, did a complete reinstall with the correct s/n and everything was fine.
I gave the machine back and the next day he's giving me tales of lockups and reboots. I hadn't used the mobo CD so told him to install the 4in1s, K8 and gfx drivers from there. This allegedly improved matters some, but not totally.
He brought the machine back again, I found disk errors in the event log for the old 20GB so removed it, reformatted and reinstalled (OS now assigned D:, but no biggy). This time I used the mobo CD for the cpu and gfx, and everything was perfectly fine. Had the machine on for 3/5 hours, lots of cold & warm reboots and everything was lightning fast and rock solid.
He takes is away again and within 5 minutes of turning it on is having problems:
"I connected up the computer, and switched on. It booted up fine (and quickly) so I opened up my account, and went to Control Panel ... so far so good. Control Panel opened up and I switched to traditional view, which loaded fine. I then clicked on 'Users' and everything froze up, with the hour glass showing, but nothing else going on. After about a minute it rebooted. From then on it goes as far as the Windows XP screen, then, after about 5 sec of that reboots again, and keeps going through the same cycle over and over again."
I tell him to check everything is seated, fans speeds, voltages etc and this is the reply:
"I have poked, prodded, wiggled, etc, etc, and could see nothing that appeared loose, except the leads that I assume came off the old hard drive which were floating in the ether, and another which comes from the power supply, and is tucked just under the CD drives, but doesn't appear to have anywhere to go.
All three fans are working.
I went into BIOS and the Hardware welfare (I think that is what it calls itself) says:
CPU temp 40C
M/B temp 36C
CPU fan speed 3090 RPM
Chassis fan speed N/A
Vcore : 1.447V
+3.30V : 3.435V
+5.00V : 5.229V
+12.00V : 12.387V"
He says nothing else is plugged in. He's using a different k/b, mouse and monitor, but that is all.
What could I be missing? He knows to treat the machine gently.
Turned out the OS s/n was wrong (ahem!), and there was evidence of a virus, so I reformatted C:, did a complete reinstall with the correct s/n and everything was fine.
I gave the machine back and the next day he's giving me tales of lockups and reboots. I hadn't used the mobo CD so told him to install the 4in1s, K8 and gfx drivers from there. This allegedly improved matters some, but not totally.
He brought the machine back again, I found disk errors in the event log for the old 20GB so removed it, reformatted and reinstalled (OS now assigned D:, but no biggy). This time I used the mobo CD for the cpu and gfx, and everything was perfectly fine. Had the machine on for 3/5 hours, lots of cold & warm reboots and everything was lightning fast and rock solid.
He takes is away again and within 5 minutes of turning it on is having problems:
"I connected up the computer, and switched on. It booted up fine (and quickly) so I opened up my account, and went to Control Panel ... so far so good. Control Panel opened up and I switched to traditional view, which loaded fine. I then clicked on 'Users' and everything froze up, with the hour glass showing, but nothing else going on. After about a minute it rebooted. From then on it goes as far as the Windows XP screen, then, after about 5 sec of that reboots again, and keeps going through the same cycle over and over again."
I tell him to check everything is seated, fans speeds, voltages etc and this is the reply:
"I have poked, prodded, wiggled, etc, etc, and could see nothing that appeared loose, except the leads that I assume came off the old hard drive which were floating in the ether, and another which comes from the power supply, and is tucked just under the CD drives, but doesn't appear to have anywhere to go.
All three fans are working.
I went into BIOS and the Hardware welfare (I think that is what it calls itself) says:
CPU temp 40C
M/B temp 36C
CPU fan speed 3090 RPM
Chassis fan speed N/A
Vcore : 1.447V
+3.30V : 3.435V
+5.00V : 5.229V
+12.00V : 12.387V"
He says nothing else is plugged in. He's using a different k/b, mouse and monitor, but that is all.
What could I be missing? He knows to treat the machine gently.
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