PC Freezes - HELP!!!

[joel]

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.epox (More info?)

The system is an Epox EP-8KHA+ with the latest BIOS (4/25/03), AMD
1800+, 512 Mb Crucial memory, Adaptec 29160, Seagate Cheetah 36Gb SCSI
HD, WinFAST A350 Video Card, WinXP.

The PC has been running fine for about 1 1/2 years, then the power
supply seemed like it was starting to go, so I replaced the power
supply and the PC has started freezing up. I put the old power supply
back in and it still freezes up.

I'm down to just a floppy drive, memory and video card. (I've tried a
different memory stick and a different video card with no
improvement.)

Here are the symptoms:

Whether booting to XP normal mode, XP safe mode, Win98 floppy, the PC
randomly freezes up. When it freezes, no errors are displayed, the
keyboard and mouse have no affect, and ctrl-alt-del has no affect. To
start again, I either have to reset or power off/on. Normally it
freezes up when the PC is doing something, like a Norton virus scan,
but it has frozen up just idling in XP.

When booting to the Win98 floppy and staying in DOS, just doing
periodic directories, the PC continues to run. But if I do anything to
even partially stress the PC, it freezes.

Thinking it might be a memory problem, I downloaded DocMemory and ran
that from DOS, after booting to the Win98 floppy. It freezes up at
different times and at different memory locations, using different
memory sticks. The shortest it ran was 1 second, the longest about 2
minutes, but it never froze up at the same memory location.

BIOS reports the CPU temperature at around 50C, so I don't think it's
a heat problem.

I guess it's smelling like a hardware problem, but I don't know what
the "typical" symptoms are when a motherboard or CPU begin to fail.

Any ideas on what could be causing these symptoms?

I'm out of ideas and could use some direction.

Thanks for the help.

Joel

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.epox (More info?)

If your memory cant handle a dos based memory test for more than 2 mintues
thats a big clue. Did the test freeze up with both memory sticks? if it did,
did you try the memory in different slots?

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.epox (More info?)

"Joel" <jziegler@wi.rr.com> wrote in message
news:87fc566d.0405061652.255f668f@posting.google.com...
> The system is an Epox EP-8KHA+ with the latest BIOS (4/25/03), AMD
> 1800+, 512 Mb Crucial memory, Adaptec 29160, Seagate Cheetah 36Gb SCSI
> HD, WinFAST A350 Video Card, WinXP.
>
> The PC has been running fine for about 1 1/2 years, then the power
> supply seemed like it was starting to go, so I replaced the power
> supply and the PC has started freezing up. I put the old power supply
> back in and it still freezes up.
>
> I'm down to just a floppy drive, memory and video card. (I've tried a
> different memory stick and a different video card with no
> improvement.)
<...>
> Any ideas on what could be causing these symptoms?
>

See the reply from Lockzie, '8KHA+ probs'. His random problems have
resolved to the electrolytic capacitors around the CPU. These are
leaking 'brown stuff' which is the caustic electrolyte, from the tops.

It's probably time to think about a replacement motherboard.


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