Re: A PC question.


"Dave Plowman (News)" <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:4f9ed68c21dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
This is something that seems to have defeated the best minds in the UK so
I thought I'd try here...;-)

I have a home assembled PC - about 18 months old - using an Asus A8N5X MB
and an Athlon 64 3000+ CPU. It's mainly used for semi-pro AV work.

After a year or so of faultless service, it started shutting down at
random. Would usually boot up again ok and carry on. After a few occasions
I took to having PCProbe loaded and noticed the CPU temp would shoot up
just before it shut down. So naturally removed the heatsink/fan, cleaned
and replaced with new thermal transfer compound.

All was well for a month or so, then the fault started happening earlier
and earlier - sometimes before XP had loaded. The bios power management
page again showed the CPU overheating - going from ambient to overheat in
around a minute. But the heatsink was cool to the touch. ;-)

I was intending to use the shotgun approach and simply replace the MB -
and possibly CPU - but it seems this design of MB is now obsolete so I'd
have to change lots of other things too.

I've not been able to find any description of how the CPU temp sensing
works let alone any clues on fixing what must be an intermittent fault -
as I've stripped and re-assembled the entire computer, cleaned all
connectors etc, and it's fine again once more. But for how long?...

Any informed guesses?

--


Dave Plowman dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.


Good observation on the CPU temp, but it might just be a red herring.
Running lots of operations in the CPU will also spike its temp, this may
just be a normal signature of the crashing code.

I'm battling one of these random problems myself. If you go to the
properties of my computer, the advanced tab and Setup button in the startup
and recovery section you can uncheck "Automatically Restart" and also make
sure it is creating a crash dump file (note the folder location). You will
now begin seeing the BSOD (blue screen of death) when you crash and you can
learn if the same operation is crashing it each time or if it truly is
random.

Find these crash dump files and use MSDEBUG. If you want to try it, just
download it from here:
http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols/debuggers/dbg_x86_6.8.4.0.msi

The analysis of the crash file will tell you which driver is crashing.
Running the -V command inside the result file will dump the last few lines
of code it was running and the addresses it was using. If you are lucky it
will point to a driver for a peripheral. I keep getting NTOSKRNL.sys which
is essentially the windows memory manager and is too generic to be useful.
Look up the results on the last line of the report on google for more clues.

These problems can be maddening to fix. It could be a driver compatibility
issue or a hardware failure. Months of trial and error are usually required
and even then, you may not know if or how it was repaired.

Try running in safe mode for a few days if you can tolerate it. If it
stopps crashing, this suggests a driver. You can also temporarily disable
many drivers and TSR programs from MSCONFIG (use the run command in the
start button to invoke it).


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