Crashes, PLEASE HELP

[malcontent]

My PC which is running 256mb DDR 266 RAM (1 module), Athlon XP 1900+ and MSI K7T266 Pro m'board is locking up. It locked up on XP, so I booted in to 2000, same story, 98, you guessed it.

I then logged in to Linux (RH 9.0) and I have the same problem. It has been getting more frequent, now Linux/XP lock up before they even reach the logon prompt. Can anyone explain what is going on before I run out and buy a new m'board CPU and RAM

(btw, the definition of crash I'm using is screen freezes, mouse not moving and caps lock etc not responding)

I have a feeling that the hardware may be dead (or is it possibly a PSU underpowered kinda thing?)

 

[Nunyobiznes]

Try booting into safe mode. Usually you press F8 and that will bring up the boot menu. Sound like there are services or applications that are set to load at startup that are causing a conflict. If you can boot into safemode then that's your problem. Could also be a driver issue with some recent hardware additions or updated video drivers.

 

[malcontent]

That could explain windows falling over (although all 3 versions sounds a little suspicious) but Linux is confusing. I haven't tried using SuSE for a while so I'm going to boot in to that but the crash timing is getting me worried. Windows used to lock up when I was working, then it started locking up at the login prompt, not before that. Red hat started crashing at the login prompt and now on the boot screen (enters interactive startup and crashed when it was enabling swap space)

I'm going to try windows XP/2000/98 in safe mode now (unfortunately I'm having to write this on my parents dinosaur cel 466MHz)

 

[malcontent]

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggghhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

XP safe mode just locked up

SuSE locked up about 5 seconds in to boot

Is it me or is this machine completely and utterly fubar?

 

[LTR12101B]

I'm thinking that running several passes of a ramtest program would be a good idea - it sounds like bad RAM - though a weak PSU is another good guess.

In the order I remembered and found them
1. http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp - Windows Memory Diagnostic
2. http://www.simmtester.com/PAGE/products/doc/docinfo.asp - Docmemory
3. http://www.memtest86.com/ - Memtest86

Of the 3, Memtest86 is probably the oldest and most respected, and is also fully open about test methods and limitations of them.

 

[Dnd4evr]

I just went though a similar problem on my system. It tended to reboot at ever shorter time periods until I couldn't boot to the desktop (occasionaly it would freeze).

I noticed a couple of bad caps (bulging) on the motherboard that I replaced (don't try this your self unless you know what you are doing). I also had a RAM slot go dead and 1 strip of RAM was flakey (not from the slot that went bad). Don't know what happened to cause all that, but its running again for now. Good thing its my least used system .

Maybe overclocking the system by 27% wasn't such a good idea after all. Never had so much go wrong at once before, but this was an older used motherboard I had to repair (broken trace) just to get it operational (hey it was a freebie).

 

[malcontent]

Well I finally gave up (and if you read my posts regarding reccomended P4 boards etc) I decided to gut the PC and replace the unholy trinity.

New M'board (Asus P4C800 deluxe)
New CPU (Intel Pentium 4 2.6 GHz 800 MHz bus)
New RAM (Crucial 256mb DDR400 X2)

Would've bought Corsair or Kingston hyperX but das kapital (or lack of which) caused a few problems. I was initially worried about installing the heatsink (the levers worried me slightly) but it is secure, it is cool (somtimes runs as 25 degrees idle), it is very fast and importantly, not a single BSOD

 

[Dnd4evr]

Glad to hear you have a solution you are happy with.

I haven't had any experience with systems greater than a P3 yet (next build will be a near bleeding edge system), but with these older ones the Crucial RAM has been great. The system I had half die wouldn't boot with Corsair RAM when I set it up, but I pulled a Crucial strip from another system and it worked fine. Unfortunatly the shop I bought the Corsair from didn't carry Crucial so they gave me generic replacement. I will never buy generic non-warrantied RAM again (I was going for cheap and that's what I got ).