Harrison
26th October 2007, 02:42
Have you ever owned a computer that has never worked perfectly? Well I have one that always seems to have an issue regardless of what I do with it.
It was originally my main PC, but even then it had problems. The CPU temperature was always too high (often 55 deg + some days, and hitting 60 in the summer), regardless of the case cooling and CPU coolers I tried. It is an Athlon XP 3000+ though and those do run hotter then other CPUs, although not normally this hot. It did run nicely though and games were stable, but sometimes for no reason and with out warning it sometimes just froze at the desktop while you were working. Even the mouse pointer stopped moving. I always thought this might be over heating, but never managed to fix the issue and it was completely random, with the system running for weeks before it froze again and I never got an over heating warning from the bios or errors in the system logs. And due to the hot CPU, and the inside of the system in general I had resorted to 6 80mm case fans (2 at the front and 4 at the rear), so you can imagine it was quite noisy.
Then there was the thunderstorm that blew this PC up in spectacular fashion. I had been playing Rodland on MAME when the power suddenly went off and stayed off all night. So the next day I tried to start the PC up and it wouldn't do anything. This often happens after a power cut because the PSU protects itself from power surge. So I removed the power cord and plugged it all back in to reset the PSU, switched on and BANG! A huge flash of light came out of the back of the PSU and the lovely smell of electrical burning followed. :( Dead PSU then!
So I bought a new PSU, connected it all up and nothing. Seems the PSU had taken something else with it. After much testing it was the motherboard that was fried. But as I had two SATA HDs stripped together using the motherboard's built in SATA raid controller the only way to access the data on them was using this board's controller.
At this point I decided I had had enough of this jinxed PC so built a new one (the one I currently have as my main PC).
But I also wanted to access the SATA HDs from the old system, so I hunted around and found an identical motherboard on ebay. Connected it up and everything worked. But I also wanted to fix the loud case and improve the cooling, so I threw the existing case away and got a Thermaltake case instead. So after setting everything back up and installing Windows on a spare HD (was using the original system HD in the new PC I built) it was all working and the inside of the case was now cooler, although the CPU still runs too hot, but it now has a very big and noisy jet heatsink with a manual speed control, so with that turned right up it's noisy but the CPU stays below 40 deg.
But... since building the new PC I've only used this old rebuilt one occasionally for testing, or when repairing PCs (to back up HDs or test components). But every time I go to use it something else seems to be wrong with it! And it continued the other week. I switched it on and it wouldn't boot. After testing for ages I discovered the CMOS battery was dead. Then it took ages to get the system to finally boot up.
Then yesterday I needed to use the system again to back up an HD from a dead PC I'm repairing for someone. I connected the HD to the system, switched on and received a single long beep from the PC speaker and the diagnostic lights showed a bas memory error. :( So I reseated the memory, removed the extra HD and the system started up, but the main HD was not detected. I checked the cable was plugged in at both ends but still nothing. After more testing I tried a different IDE cable and it worked. So now it seems the IDE cable somehow suddenly broke.
So with the system now working again I copied the data from the other HD, then disconnected that HD and put it back in the repaired PC ready to install a new OS. I rebooted the PC to backup the data from that HD to DVD and the system crashed with a BSOD!!! Hmm... And the error was an odd one. BAD_POOL_CALLER. Never had that one before and not much info on it online.
So I rebooted, and it seemed to load OK, so I began to burn the first DVD, but then just before the system wrote to the disk another BSOD popped up saying NTFS.sys had caused a system error and it needed to close down. :blink:
Could be bad memory I suppose, but I ran memtest though this ram and it didn't report any errors.
So I finally got the system to burn the DVD backups, until the last DVD completed, whereby the verification reported it had failed because "the files on the disc did not match the source files". What?
I give up. I want to bin this machine now!!! :owned:
OK rant over. You didn't have to read all that. I just needed to post it to get the annoyance out of my system.
It was originally my main PC, but even then it had problems. The CPU temperature was always too high (often 55 deg + some days, and hitting 60 in the summer), regardless of the case cooling and CPU coolers I tried. It is an Athlon XP 3000+ though and those do run hotter then other CPUs, although not normally this hot. It did run nicely though and games were stable, but sometimes for no reason and with out warning it sometimes just froze at the desktop while you were working. Even the mouse pointer stopped moving. I always thought this might be over heating, but never managed to fix the issue and it was completely random, with the system running for weeks before it froze again and I never got an over heating warning from the bios or errors in the system logs. And due to the hot CPU, and the inside of the system in general I had resorted to 6 80mm case fans (2 at the front and 4 at the rear), so you can imagine it was quite noisy.
Then there was the thunderstorm that blew this PC up in spectacular fashion. I had been playing Rodland on MAME when the power suddenly went off and stayed off all night. So the next day I tried to start the PC up and it wouldn't do anything. This often happens after a power cut because the PSU protects itself from power surge. So I removed the power cord and plugged it all back in to reset the PSU, switched on and BANG! A huge flash of light came out of the back of the PSU and the lovely smell of electrical burning followed. :( Dead PSU then!
So I bought a new PSU, connected it all up and nothing. Seems the PSU had taken something else with it. After much testing it was the motherboard that was fried. But as I had two SATA HDs stripped together using the motherboard's built in SATA raid controller the only way to access the data on them was using this board's controller.
At this point I decided I had had enough of this jinxed PC so built a new one (the one I currently have as my main PC).
But I also wanted to access the SATA HDs from the old system, so I hunted around and found an identical motherboard on ebay. Connected it up and everything worked. But I also wanted to fix the loud case and improve the cooling, so I threw the existing case away and got a Thermaltake case instead. So after setting everything back up and installing Windows on a spare HD (was using the original system HD in the new PC I built) it was all working and the inside of the case was now cooler, although the CPU still runs too hot, but it now has a very big and noisy jet heatsink with a manual speed control, so with that turned right up it's noisy but the CPU stays below 40 deg.
But... since building the new PC I've only used this old rebuilt one occasionally for testing, or when repairing PCs (to back up HDs or test components). But every time I go to use it something else seems to be wrong with it! And it continued the other week. I switched it on and it wouldn't boot. After testing for ages I discovered the CMOS battery was dead. Then it took ages to get the system to finally boot up.
Then yesterday I needed to use the system again to back up an HD from a dead PC I'm repairing for someone. I connected the HD to the system, switched on and received a single long beep from the PC speaker and the diagnostic lights showed a bas memory error. :( So I reseated the memory, removed the extra HD and the system started up, but the main HD was not detected. I checked the cable was plugged in at both ends but still nothing. After more testing I tried a different IDE cable and it worked. So now it seems the IDE cable somehow suddenly broke.
So with the system now working again I copied the data from the other HD, then disconnected that HD and put it back in the repaired PC ready to install a new OS. I rebooted the PC to backup the data from that HD to DVD and the system crashed with a BSOD!!! Hmm... And the error was an odd one. BAD_POOL_CALLER. Never had that one before and not much info on it online.
So I rebooted, and it seemed to load OK, so I began to burn the first DVD, but then just before the system wrote to the disk another BSOD popped up saying NTFS.sys had caused a system error and it needed to close down. :blink:
Could be bad memory I suppose, but I ran memtest though this ram and it didn't report any errors.
So I finally got the system to burn the DVD backups, until the last DVD completed, whereby the verification reported it had failed because "the files on the disc did not match the source files". What?
I give up. I want to bin this machine now!!! :owned:
OK rant over. You didn't have to read all that. I just needed to post it to get the annoyance out of my system.