On Mon, Jul 07, 2003 at 11:46:47AM -0500, Alex Malinovich wrote: > I've been noticing some very strange problems with my primary desktop. I > normally don't shut ever shut it off and everything works great. No > crashes, no lockups, no instability. However, any time I shut it off for > a while before turning it back on, it becomes extremely unstable. It > will crash, lockup, spontaneously reboot, etc, for a few minutes. But > once it's "warmed up" it's back to its usual stable self. Obviously, the > first idea that comes to mind is thermal expansion, but I can't think > where the problem could lie. Everything that attaches to a motherboard > tends to do so quite firmly, and for good reason. Any suggestions?
I had this too, some years back. Ended up throwing away the motherboard. Ah no, I still have it somewhere, :-) Anyway, you might want to start (Free)DOS and write a simple program (C, asm, QBASIC, ;-) that only prints the current time to the screen. That's a one-liner in basic. Let it run for a while... I noticed that my RTC just stopped ticking! Pushing the battery or the motherboard someplaces, spraying cooling liquid (for finding thermal defects) and such things let the clock tick again, but only for a few seconds. After many minutes (15-30 or so...) the clock started ticking, slowly, ... and after it gained a reasonable 'speed' I could reboot and everything worked flawlessly. The problem with linux and windows was that they did all sorts of things and crashed immediately when the RTC stopped, whereas DOS continued UNLESS (!!!!) you generated an interrupt (eg. touching the keyboard). Whether you have this same behaviour or not, I would say your motherboard is broken and you have a thermal defect: a contact somewhere that (after thermal expansion) will remain conducting and in place, but before that behaves erratically. HTH, David -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
