Mmmm… Troubleshooting

I recently brought home a dead computer that I’d diagnosed as having a failed motherboard and/or CPU and/or hard drive, to see what I could salvage from it, and if nothing else, to use the case with a motherboard and CPU I’ve had kicking around.

The symptoms were spontaneous reboots and blue screens, sometimes at widely separate intervals.  Ruled out already were RAM, power supply and power outlets, bad CD-ROM drive (believe it or not, I’ve seen that happen), overheating, and presumably software.

I decided to hook it up and see where it stood.  It turned out to be easiest to hook it to the monitor in the kid’s room, which makes things interesting.  I briefly thought I was mistaken and somehow it worked after purging most software, stopping some extraneous services, and cleaning things up, despite the spontaneous reboot, bluescreen and CMOS checksum error when I first fired it up.  Sure enough, it eventually barfed.

The easiest thing I could do was test the hard drive aspect.  I put in a brand new drive and installed Windows 2000.  I have yet to see certain signs of a spontaneous reboot, but I have found it shut off a couple times.  One of them the kids probably couldn’t have done.  Thus I think I have my answer, but for now I’m letting them pound on a Windows keybanger program I copied over from this machine.  I’m not absolutely certain, as it could have been power management gone wild, and there’s been no signs of errors.  Event log shows that the event log service started at whatever time.  Then it shows it started again at whatever later time.  It doesn’t record that the service stopped, as with a gentle shutdown.  It also doesn’t indicate anything traumatic.  Weird.

If the problem is the board and/or CPU, I have a case for my spare board and CPU, and a spare 40 GB hard drive (since I’d then assume the drive is fine).  If the problem is only the drive, then I have a spare computer for which I only had to supply a drive.

I need to organize my office at home to be better equpped to operate several computers.  That’ll probably involve another monitor, another desk/shelf arrangement, and a couple of KVM switches.  Should be interesting.

Update:

It’s clearly the motherboard (or CPU or both, but I’m not going to try to troubleshoot them separately).  That leaves me able to turn the box into a 1.8 GHz (instead of 2.66) with a 200 GB drive, or trying the 40 GB drive, or a smaller, scavenged drive, with a floppy and CD drive already there.  I’ll need a video card, which either I have in inventory or likely can scavenge, and RAM, which likely can come off the bad board or can be scavenged.

I’d been thinking of making the 1.8 a Linux box when I got around to building it, but we’ll see.

Meanwhile, yesterday I pulled out the shiny blue case that’s waiting to be my next “personal” computer and put in the fancy power supply, DVD and DVD-RW drives to consolidate all the parts into one box.  The thing is designed to prefer black faceplates on the drives, and it turned out the DVD burner came with both black and beige, with black being the default already on it.  The DVD was beige.  Not that it looks bad, but if I truly want to color match, I’ll get a black one and use the beige in another machine.

I have no idea what I’m going to buy for a board and CPU for the blue case, but I’d like it to be far enough from topline to be affordable, and close enough to it so maybe it’s another seven years before I’m switching primary home computers.  Sadly, I am seriously contemplating Vista for that machine, just so I have been exposed to it enough to support it.  Not that I haven’t supported software I have never seen or used, usually sight-unseen over the phone, usually successfully, but still.  On the other hand, if I can build/rebuild/get a machine good enough to run Vista but expendable, perhaps I’ll stick to putting it on a lab machine.

Posted by on 04/09 at 07:42 AM

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