Ram or power suply

Fellow antionlyners,

I need help. I've a AMD Tbird 800MHz with 256Mb Ram PC133, Lately, all kinds of things have been happening:

1 - The power suply fan humms until it heats up, then the noise is gone.

2 - All kinds off fatal exceptions and errors happend, on any program, in any circumstancies, such as:

IE 5.5 crashes, Word2000 crashes, games crash, instalation programs crash.

The PC shuts down by himself suddenly and with no warning, and simply reboots.

Windows2000 sais he lost a couple of files such as configuration files and now its all messed up.

I wonder if anyone could help me on what to do.

Thanks

:( :(

I'm guessing that it's the power supply, a quick initial test would be from the BIOS (before window$ starts up), try pressing the del key, f2 (or whatever it tells you to enter set-up), see if the power supply output is listed and if so, check the outputs to see if they're stable. It may also be worth checking to see if your power supply is powerful enough for your set-up, if you have multiple hard disks & CD's etc, the drain on your supply might be too great, if thats the case, try disconnecting some of the bits to see if you some stability back.
Lastly (but not least), check to see if there are any BIOS upgrades available for your MOBO, if there are, flash the BIOS and see if that helps.

Quote:

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Originally posted by jcdux
I'm guessing that it's the power supply, a quick initial test would be from the BIOS (before window$ starts up), try pressing the del key, f2 (or whatever it tells you to enter set-up), see if the power supply output is listed and if so, check the outputs to see if they're stable. It may also be worth checking to see if your power supply is powerful enough for your set-up, if you have multiple hard disks & CD's etc, the drain on your supply might be too great, if thats the case, try disconnecting some of the bits to see if you some stability back.
Lastly (but not least), check to see if there are any BIOS upgrades available for your MOBO, if there are, flash the BIOS and see if that helps.

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yeah it looks like a power supply, is it on the right settings, i believe that amd needs a special type of power supply above the normal one used before, check that your fan on the supply is working and the power output thats stated in your bios. then have fun reinstallin your os :D

Well, the power supply is aok, at least I think it is, no oscilations, fan speed on 4300 basis, and I have no idea what my AMD Tbird should use, maybe amd.com can tell me no? :)

Meanwhile I'll test the memory and maybe try something else, like Linux or even FreeDos or... I donno. I'm really pissed off with this, any help will be wellcome, specially the kind that doesn't cost money, meaning I'd like to be sure before buying a new power unit or more mem :\

Thank you all

Pipas_

If at first you do succeed try not to look ustonished.

Dumb question but what about the internal CPU fan(s)? Those kinds of errors are usually that. As for the noise, that's not uncommon for cheap power supplies. When they reach a certain temp the heat expands the metal. Try turning the machine on with the case off.

Do you have any slots (PCI/ISA) that have openings in the back? That could cause problems with air flow and result in a higher temp.

Dou you have an Asus board? if so you might want to try their monitoring utility "Asus PC-Probe" to see if voltage or temperature changes while working... As the others said, it might just act up under load... Also check that fans and heatsinks are well seated... Post you system specs... You might want to check you're voltage setups (in bios or jumpers depending on mobos) to make sure it's appropriate for you're cpu...

Ammo


Personal experience with hardware:
While building my OpenBSD box, using hardware I had laying around, and only new RAM, compiling a new kernel would make the box freeze. No errors, no nothing! I spent bout a week searching for software issues, and then that weekend determined it must had been hardware related... Changed ram: didn't freeze at the same point but still did. Plugged the hd in another box and it compiled fine... So only thing left I thought was the mobo, so changed it for a slightly older board I had and it worked... I was glad it now worked but somewhat sad cuz that board was P5 166mhz max, and I had a p5 233 cpu... Then, I few minutes later my father was looking at the *bugged* mobo and checked out the jumpers for cpu voltage... turnes out we had forgotten to adjust them from the previous cpu... they were still set for a k6-166... DUH!!! Switch everyting back on that mobo with correct voltage and it worked fine... ARGH!! ;)
// This slice of life brought to you by Ammo...

I would recommend changing out thepower supply. As for the computer restarting by itself you might want to check under the mother board and mae sure that there are no standoffs still left that would touch the board. I found that out the hard way and it killed my pci slots. You could check memory. If it was the memory it should have not worked on the startup. And the computer wont boot if your memory is bad.
Hope that helped.

Well, I believe it must be the power supply, I just ran a memory test for about 2 hours and the memory stood firm :)
So, I guess it must be the power supply.

By the way, can someone tell me what the correct power settings would be for a AMD Thunderbird 800 MHz, or where I can find this settings, I've tries AMD.com, but the info there is quite a mess for my poor knowlidge.

Yes, I am no hacker, just a user with a eager desire to have some answers.

By the way, if you need some English to Portuguese translations I would be glad to help, after all, that could be the only way to help you due to my sparce knowlidge.

Thank you all

pipas_:D

Its your power supply or could be a short on your mother board or a virus that ****ed your computer up one or the other but i suggest you have it looked at

Its your power supply or could be a short on your mother board or a virus that opened a port for someone and messed your computer up I suggest you have it looked at

Here is what AMD recommends for power supplies.

What kind of settings are you looking for? Voltage for proccessor, power supply, etc.etc.?

Ive seen a lot of posts saying that it is the power supply, but would a bad powersupply cause so many software errors such as IE crashing? You said that the computer was missing many files. Might I suggest running full diagnostic on the hard drive. Also make sure it is getting proper cooling.

Quote:

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Originally posted by ThePreacher
Ive seen a lot of posts saying that it is the power supply, but would a bad powersupply cause so many software errors such as IE crashing? You said that the computer was missing many files. Might I suggest running full diagnostic on the hard drive. Also make sure it is getting proper cooling.

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A bad power supply can cause the voltage to drop which can result in cpu errors that could crash an application... Bad voltage can cause all sorts of weird things... As for the missing files, it could be a result of the reboots while writing to disk...

Also, for the proper voltage settings, check out your motherboard's user manual (and if you lost it check out the manifacturer's web site, they usually have pdf versions availible)

Ammo

The memory was tested, it's not the memory.

It should be the power supply, since I have no virus, and no trojan, the firewall does not refer to any incoming or outgoing transmition, the port dump does not either ( yes port dump ) and MacAfee says I'm bug free from virus, the only ones that could be there are does versions of special servers of Sub7 or some quite unknown thing.

Yesterday I had a strange reboot, I was surfing, and on IRC at the same time, and the machine just shut down mirc and IE and did a logout, the next screen was the login screen, and it was so fast I first did not understand what had happenned.

My friend told me it was the fastest logout he'd ever seen, not a second long. :D

The power values I need are does of the core of the CPU and of the external parts.

Thank you all;)

If I remember correctly, AMD recommends at least a 300 Watt power supply.

Quote:

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ve seen a lot of posts saying that it is the power supply, but would a bad powersupply cause so many software errors such as IE crashing? You said that the computer was missing many files.

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Yes, a power supply could cause software instabilities.

Pedroamado - You never mentioned what other stuff you have in your PC. If you give a fully detailed listing, it would help. Many of the newer graphics accelerators require more power than a conventional video card, as do high speed disk drives.

It could very well be that you have a 250Watt power supply and you need a 300 Watt PS instead. This type of thing would cause the random resets you're describing -- I know, I just dealt with a TBird 1.2GHz with a failing power supply at work last week.

Thanks chsh,

I have a couple of hard drives, one 6Gb the other 15 Gb, 256Mb of 133mHz ram, a cdrom reader, a RivaTNT2 32Mb, and.... thats all, sound is motherboard resident, it came with the board and... nothing on the USB's.

Actually I was considering a third drive big IBM 20Gto install Windows 2000 and Linux and some other stuff, and also a CDrw, but now... with this happening... nothing before I solve it :(

Actually there is something else, please don't call me too stupid too many times, I have the 6Gb disk hanging and touching the box, I thing thats not the best way, but I'm gonna fix that and see what happends.

Thank you all.

:)