Motherboard shopping

[markw at mohawksoft.com (markw at mohawksoft.com)]

OK, here are the steps:

1st, with a good volt meter, while the machine is running, make sure all
the voltages are good. Sometimes people add cards and hard disks to
systems and overload the power supply and push the voltage down to where
the system sort of runs.

Next, Remove all cards except video card (if you have a known good video
card, all the better). Boot the system and see if it exhibits the problem.
If it does not, you have found a hardware failure in one of your
peripheral cards. (check the voltages again)

Next, if not a peripheral card or powersupply, restore the system to its
old self and check if it acts up. Oxidation may have been the cause and
replacing the cards may have cleaned the contacts.

Remove and re-seat the CPU and memory. Oxidation again.

If it continues to be a problem, take out half the RAM. See if it still a
problem. If it is not, replace the first half of the RAM with the half
that was removed and see if the problem returns. If it does, one of those
two ram sims/dims are the problem.

If playing around with the RAM did not make it go away, it is either
motherboard or CPU. It is not very likely that it is a CPU issue as these
are typically very stable. Conversely, I've seen a lot of motheboard who's
electrolytic capacitors degrade and leave the system flakey.

Good luck.


>
> Message: 10
> Date: Fri, 27 Jan 2006 10:11:42 -0500
> From: Doug <dougsweetser at gmail.com>
> Subject: Motherboard shopping
> To: discuss at blu.org
> Message-ID:
> 	<6b2fb07e0601270711o39407870x76c2eefd3055cfe0 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Hello:
>
> My computer takes two or three tries to get thought the boot sequence.
>  It reboots at random times after it has booted.  I need to take care
> of this issue, but I am not so good at diagnosing this sort of things,
> so I am thinking of replacing the motherboard/chip/memory.  I did the
> memory test for about a half hour, and nothing showed up.  The board
> is a Sanyo bought as a MicroCenter discount item.
>
> Given this experience, I would like a combination of board/chip/memory
> that is rock solid reliable.  I guess that means ECC RAM.  I have been
> buying AMD's of late, but if something from Intel is better over time,
> I could go that way.  What would you buy?
>
> doug
>