🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sun, 29 May 2005 11:53:09 -0400, "Uncle Vinnie"
<vinrin57@nospam.optonline.net> wrote:

>Well..   the power supply is not it.... BSOD again.  My daughter shut down, 
>so I don't know what it was.

BSOD is possibly just windows-acting-like-windows-does.
That is, there are a multitude of things that could be
interacting at this point.

Is the system still shutting off?  Or did "shut down" not
mean "shut off" but rather, reboot?

Shutdowns and failures to start are most commonly the power
supply.  However, if the system had been running in an
instable state for a time, it's quite possible you now have
file corruption, or even worse- large amounts of ripple from
an insufficient (or defective, etc) power supply can in fact
damage other parts, those other parts can even "die" from
that before the power supply itself degrades enough to force
replacement.  Basically when it's insufficient capacity, the
voltage drops more per any load and the capacitors on other
components are depleted much moreso as they had higher
potential still.  That wears them out faster.


>
>Maybe one driver???  

You can certainly disable anything you can do without.
It's not quite clear how frequent this (any particular
aspect of the multiple failures:  BSOD, shut down, and
failure-to-start) occurs, if there is any commonality to any
or all of them.  Sometimes it can be something as simple as
two apps that don't get along- for the BSOD at least, not
the shut down or failure to turn on.

If I were putting odds down, the failure to start would be
either power (are you sure the replacement PSU is
good/adequate?), or motherboard.  However, odds are just
that- if I replied this way to 10 people and odds were 9:1,
I might be wrong one of those times.


>This has been going on a year and a half

This same problem for a year and a half?
I dont' recall at the moment, but are you running most
recent motherboard bios?

If possible, I'd consider making a backup of the current OS
partition and doing a clean OS install as a testbed, then
adding no drivers yet, trying to reproduce the problem and
gradually adding back drivers.  Other options include one of
those boot-from-CD linux distros to try another OS, or
running something like memtest86 for a day, Prime 95's
Torture Test for several hours, 3DMark (whichever version is
appropriate for your age/performance-level of video card,
perhaps 3DMark '99 or 2000 if the video is as old as the
board).


> and I cannot 
>for the life of me figure out what it could be.  Even Viewer has nothing... 
>right click my computer, and there are no 'exclamation points'...where else 
>can I look???

Can you monitor temps and voltages?  
You might see if MBM5 (motherboard monitor) supports your
system and if it'll log the parameters... though a
multimeter is nice for voltage readings too.

Is it possible the board is shorting out on a misplaced
motherboard tray standoff?  If all else fails, pull the
board and set it up on a desk in a minimalistic
configuration.


>
>Thank you.. I am literally at whit's end....

Sometimes it's simply easier to swap in other parts... and
other times a box gets old enough that it's not worthwhile
to hunt down the parts.  If all else fails, "most" of the
parts are probably good still, you could always ebay a large
chunk of parts "as is", perhaps with a note about
"something" being amiss but that it's at least working
enough that someone with the spare parts could figure it
out.