| Forum Home | ||||
| Press F1 | ||||
| Thread ID: 36440 | 2003-08-10 08:44:00 | Really wierd computer problem | Stormwarden (388) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 166566 | 2003-08-10 08:44:00 | First of all, if something like this has been covered before I'm sorry I didn't use the search. But really I don't know what I should be searching for on this... A while ago somebody asked me to fix their computer. It was suffering from lockups, blue screens etc. When I looked at it they had about fifteen programs in the system tray (duron with 128MB ram onboard vid) and 7000 files in the root directory of their hard drive. Now the thing is, it didn't actually stuff up at all while I was watching, and all I did was disable most of their startup stuff, defrag, cleaned up the hard drive etc. and left it at that. It didn't fix the problem. I received a call about a month later saying so. The next thing I looked at was inside the case. After cleaning out a good two handfulls of consolidated dust from the heatsink and the rest of the case I thought that maybe it was a heat problem. I re-formatted and started from scratch for them and everthing appeared to be fine. After I gave it back to them I got another call a couple of months later (yesterday) and apparently nothing had been fixed. Yet the funny thing is that it won't display any symptoms for me 'round at my house. They said that it wouldn't even boot last night but it worked fine for me... I've thought of their power supply (the house, not the case) but if anybody else knows what's going on here could you please help? Sorry for the long post, I can give more details if necessary Thanks |
Stormwarden (388) | ||
| 166567 | 2003-08-10 09:45:00 | sounds like different faults each time. way to much time between faults. main thing here is to find what its doing, when is it doing it, what they where doing at the time, how often it dos it, what they where doing before the fault happened. it could be power suppy but i would suspect the psu not the house supply. what sort of hardware dos it have (ie brand name od power supply)? |
tweak'e (174) | ||
| 166568 | 2003-08-10 10:21:00 | The power supply appears to be completely brandless. Generic like just about everything inside the case. | Stormwarden (388) | ||
| 166569 | 2003-08-10 10:26:00 | There isn't so much time between faults, to hear them say it, it starts up again straight after I "fix" it and give it back, but they try to use it for awhile anyway | Stormwarden (388) | ||
| 166570 | 2003-08-10 10:29:00 | any idea on size ?? (wattage) | tweak'e (174) | ||
| 166571 | 2003-08-10 10:30:00 | if its not booting at all try removing the modem card as sometimes there is a fault with the modem if there has been a power spike causing the computer not to get any power after it gets to the modem and then the power just sits in the modem not being able to travel on any further | phylip (1886) | ||
| 166572 | 2003-08-11 04:34:00 | Eh? Electricity doesn't just "sit in" a modem. :_| I'd toss any extension cords and power boards in the supply to the computer. You probably disturb power cords when you are looking at the box. Powerboards tend to be cheap and nasty. Otherwise use the automotive technique. Tighten up the loose nut holding the steering wheel. :D It might be a user problem. |
Graham L (2) | ||
| 166573 | 2003-08-11 06:03:00 | Has this person made enemies? Does he/she have a competent firewall and virus detector? I assume you'd have checked for viruses, trojans, etc; but is it possible that the system is coming under renewed attack every time the owner gets it home? |
argus (366) | ||
| 166574 | 2003-08-11 06:38:00 | Hi Stormwarden, have you run a stand alone memory test? I had a similar set of symptoms last year and memtest86 found a single bit error in a 64Mb ram card. Memtest86 is a free download that you unzip and create a bootable floppy so the program runs with very little code in memory. HTH PC |
Peter Cox (544) | ||
| 1 | |||||