This heat is a savage killer of electronic components. Also, the dust 
that collects in these vacuum cleaners (besides being a blanket) is a 
sponge for high humidity. I regularly take a shop air compressor to the 
mobo, power supply, and drives. The power supply and floppy can hold a 
lot of dust. 

Monitors, are also vulnerable to this heat and humidity.

Sadly, once the transistors are heat damaged there is no fix. An exploded 
capacitor or burnt resistor can sometimes be spotted in the bigger 
circuits.  

If, however, it is just the boot sequence that fails, a new battery and 
reflash of the CMOS bios might do the trick. 


>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Original Message <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

On 7/19/01, 8:44:13 AM, Jim Crumley <crumley at belka.space.umn.edu> wrote 
regarding [TCLUG] Dying Computer [OT].sdm:


> So here's a situation for the hardware doctors in the house.

> My Pentium 200 MMX at home seems to be dying. The first warning was
> that I got an error message about a possible IO conflict on 2F8
> (IRQ 3?) while boot, but after booting everything worked fine
> after booting (including the modem which I think is on IRQ 3).
> Next boot, the sytem wouldn't come on at first.  When I hit the
> power the drive LEDs came on, but no boot messages went to the
> screen. Also, the normal boot sounds didn't occur ( beeps, checking
> floppy drive, hard disk searching, etc.)  I hit the power again,
> waited a couple of minutes, when I turned it on it booted and worked
> fine (though the IO warning was still there). Then, the last couple
> of times I tried to turn it on, it didn't work at all (it acted
> just like the other time).

> At first I thought the problems might be heat related since
> I have no AC, but I tried this morning when the temp was below
> 80, and still no luck.

> So any hints on what I should try? Is it probably my motherboard?

> --
> Jim Crumley                  |
> crumley at fields.space.umn.edu |
> Work: 612 624-6804 or -0378  |
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