So I started working on my brothers PC on the weekend after some crazy adventures that left me overly confused. It seemed his system was starting to play up with some strange behaviour, mainly little things like the screen not waking when it went into stand-by, after replacing the video card, it appeared to be working for a few days, only to start playing up when any type of video would start being played, the monitor would go into stand-by and nothing would bring it back again. I noticed the HDD LED was on solid while this was happening so started to suspect the HDD was dying (80G IDE, OLD!). I replaced it and it kept playing up. I swapped the RAM checked every RAM slot and even dropped back to the onboard video to completely rlle the video out. I pulled every device from the system and replaced it. This was becoming a little bit silly. At this point I got the machine booting again with no apparent reason. After only 2 more days it started to not boot into the OS at all. I started thinking I was jinxed, I reset the BIOS to safe defaults which got the machine to boot again, then tried to boot a Ubuntu live disk, after 5 consequetive reoots without any issues, I started thinking the system was behaving again. Then it struck me, the machine was detecting the CPU and memory speed different on every boot, it would detect the FSB at 100Mhz, then 133Mhz, then 166Mhz, then 200Mhz, randomly showing a different value on every single boot up. The CPU speed was fluctuating from 1300 – 3000Mhz (It’s meant to be an XP1900 (roughly 1.7)). I installed the latest BIOS (2 years old at least anyway) and it made no difference.
What the hell?
It was time to get drastic, I got a new mobo from a friend for a decent price and built up a new system from the ground. It now works like a charm again, running a 2.66Ghz Pentium D, only 1G of RAM but he can live with that. (Still running XP). All of the machine seems to be back online again and I think this motherboard can go die in someplace that nobody will hear from it again!
All useless information comes to an end and this article is no different.