Good suggestion Todd.  I'm glad I finished reading all my mail before adding 
you to the killfile ;-)

I had a capacitor blow on a 4 month old motherboard earlier this year.  I 
started to smell smoke and started sniffing around the computers.  After 
pulling the power cords out of the back of Eridor I got the case open just in 
time to see two capacitors fading from a nice bright orange.

Anyways, previous posts have covered most of the stuff I was thinking of 
(power supply in its death throws, flaky RAM / swap space, over heating CPU, 
etc).  A couple other things to try:

- If you're using an off-motherboard IDE, SCSI or video card, reseat it and 
make sure its not popping lose, this goes for any PCI/ISA/AGP cards, but 
these are usually the culprits.

- Run memtest86 (http://www.memtest86.com) on your machine and see if it finds 
anyhting

- Could very well be a driver issue, but it sounds like this just started on 
its own (without, say, a recent kernel recompile or distro update).  If it 
is, try rolling back

- If you've recently changed compilers, try going back to a slightly older 
version and recompiling anything you compiled recently.  I had a bunch of 
trouble with GCC v3.3.1 causing segmentation faults on AMD hardware.

- Clean all the dust bunnies out of your case, especially around the CPU and 
CPU fans.  Dust bunnies screw up air flow and also act like big heat sinks

The last few probably don't apply to a work machine, but I'll include for 
completeness:

- If you've overclocked your CPU, AGP bus, main bus, PCI bus, etc. try 
returning them to "factory" settings

- Make sure you aren't overloading your power supply.  Yeah I know, this is 
doesn't happen as often as it used to.  Still, add a hard drive, CD-ROM 
burner, DVD, 

- If you've overclocked your CPU, AGP bus, main bus, PCI bus, etc. try 
returning them to "factory" settings

- If you're STILL overclocking your CPU, AGP bus, main bus, PCI bus, etc. try 
returning them to "factory" settings

-- 

Ben Maas - Technology Architect
Open Technology Systems, LLC
-----------------------------------------------------------
eMail: bmaas at open-techsys.com
Web:   http://www.open-techsys.com
Phone: 952.448.3121
Fax:   952.448.4944
Cell:  612.743.3674

On Monday 20 October 2003 10:46 am, Todd Young wrote:
> Along the line of looking at hardware. Look at the capcitors on the
> motherboard. Most of them have an "X" in the metal on the top. If the
> tops are buldging then the capacitors are fried and you are looking at
> other issues if you continue to use the motherboard.
>
> I'm not sure how many motherboards this affects, but I know for a fact
> it affects IBM Intellistation EPro machines, circa manufacture 2001-2.
>
> There was a batch of bad capacitors that hit the market, I know IBM used
> them, but I'm not sure how many other manufacturers did.
>
> Sam MacDonald wrote:
> > On the hardware end look at the power supply.  A power supply thats'
> > going bad will do funny things like rebooting.  A short in your power
> > cable could cause real problems.  Wake on LAN is another thing to look
> > at if it's enabled.  I also had a dead SparQ drive cause my machine to
> > not boot on a cold start and I think it caused some reboots.
> >
> > If you fed a Gremlin after midnight you may want to check your kitchen
> > :-D
> >
> > Remember if you had a bad power surge or lightning, and something got
> > fried, home owners insurance "should" cover a new or part of a new
> > computer  :-)   My mother in law got a new P4 with all the cool stuff
> > after a lightning strike took out her modem and sound board.
> >
> > Sam.
> >
> >
> > <snip>
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
> > http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org
> > https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list


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