Am helping a friend of mine (who is extremely cash strapped) rehab his old computer to allow his children to use it as a internet portal / simple home pc.
specs on the pc are as along the lines of;
Celeron @ 2.0 ghz
256 mbs of DDR ram
a gigabyte motherboard
only using onboard video & a pretty basic PSU.
The system originally came with a 40GB IDE hard Drive.
SOooooooo..... being the friendly friend that i am, after cleaning the computer up, i dropped in a old 512mb stick of DDR ram that i had, and a spare 250 GB ide drive.
Did a fresh install of XP SP3, downloaded appropriate programs etc (firefox,avast,glary utilities,auslogic disk defrag, etc.) Everything is running very nicely and I am quite surprised with how snappy the system is.
However.
When booting the system up from a cold start without fail i get a message on the screen saying (Operating system not found) and it stops there. If i then hit the Reset button it resets and boots normally.
I am stumped as to what could be causing this problem. The computer only does this after its been powered down for a while................ my only guess is that the HDD that put in is an older IDE 250 GB drive (4-5 yrs) maybe it just takes a little while for it to spin up? and the power cycle for a cold start is not enough time???
If you need any screen shots or further explanation from me please say so. The computer is perfectly workable as is... but I would like it to be nearly flawless for his kids to use.
Thanks
specs on the pc are as along the lines of;
Celeron @ 2.0 ghz
256 mbs of DDR ram
a gigabyte motherboard
only using onboard video & a pretty basic PSU.
The system originally came with a 40GB IDE hard Drive.
SOooooooo..... being the friendly friend that i am, after cleaning the computer up, i dropped in a old 512mb stick of DDR ram that i had, and a spare 250 GB ide drive.
Did a fresh install of XP SP3, downloaded appropriate programs etc (firefox,avast,glary utilities,auslogic disk defrag, etc.) Everything is running very nicely and I am quite surprised with how snappy the system is.
However.
When booting the system up from a cold start without fail i get a message on the screen saying (Operating system not found) and it stops there. If i then hit the Reset button it resets and boots normally.
I am stumped as to what could be causing this problem. The computer only does this after its been powered down for a while................ my only guess is that the HDD that put in is an older IDE 250 GB drive (4-5 yrs) maybe it just takes a little while for it to spin up? and the power cycle for a cold start is not enough time???
If you need any screen shots or further explanation from me please say so. The computer is perfectly workable as is... but I would like it to be nearly flawless for his kids to use.
Thanks