So my MPK computer which acts as a file server, printer server, and the main hub I connect into to diagnose problems on computers within this home network, died a few months back. I had asked my sister to do a bunch of test but was unable to determine the cause.
I come back and the whole machine is dead. When I tried booting it up, it was in a constant state of reboot. I don’t even get to see the first screen. I kept removing parts to see what the cause was and finally got down to just the motherboard (now outside of the case), the CPU, the video card, the RAM, and the PSU.
I had tested the PSU on a different machine earlier and it turned out fine, so that was off the list. I then tried swapping graphics card with the ‘spare’ machine (spare being that my brother hasn’t come home yet, so I could take apart his computer if I wanted to) and the graphics card was fine. I did the same with the RAM.
What was left was the CPU and motherboard. I had tried reseating the CPU and reapplying thermal paste to it, but that didn’t seem to help. I thought if I was going to replace either the CPU or motherboard, I might as well go to Fry’s and get a combo. Which I did and ended up getting this:
I wasn’t looking for something fast or fancy, but this was the cheapest combo they had advertised and I didn’t feel like waiting for a better deal. I was also out of the air duster cans so I picked up a few. There was a TON of dust in my case.
Turns out the machine’s actually quite decent. With just the onboard video (VIA/S3G UniChrome Pro IGP) using 64MB shared from 512MB of 333MHz DDR RAM, I was able to play 1080p trailers off Apple.com on Quicktime really smoothly. The CPU that came with this combo was a Pentium D 2.8GHz.
Another reason I picked this combo was because it supported both DDR and DDR2 RAM and since my existing DDR RAM was working, I didn’t feel like splurging to get better RAM as this machine as I said is just a server that doesn’t do much. It also had an AGP slot (although I found out later it had onboard video, which couldn’t be worse than my GeForce MX400 that was in there).
Anyway, installing the CPU was rather interesting. The socket form was something neat and it actually took me half a minute to figure out how to unlatch the CPU lever. The retail fan that came with the CPU was enormous! Though I have to say, it’s pretty quiet. Then I noticed the motherboard had a longer power connector port. I was like, when did PSUs get a longer adapter?!?! At first I was like shoot, got to go back to Fry’s and get another PSU, but it turns out that these new motherboards support BOTH the 20pin and the 24pin power connectors. You just have to leave 4 pins exposed.
The machine booted up fine and I went ahead to repair Windows. Didn’t exactly work. I had hoped not to have to do a full reinstall, but it doesn’t look good. It blue screened when trying to get into Windows and immediately reboots. I then installed XP over the existing OS, but I was getting random faults occuring in random programs and sometimes the machine would just reboot on its own. I finally gave up and did a format and clean install.
I should’ve heeded to my own advice a long time ago about installing OSes only on fresh harddrives. Guess I wanted to take the lazy way out and ended up doing a lot more work.
But it turns out there was actually some memory problem. Doing a memtest resulted in tons of errors. The Crucial 512MB 333MHz by itself ran fine. The Kingston 256MB 266MHz in a seperate machine ran fine too. I’ve concluded that either the 2nd slot on the motherboard is bad, the motherboard didn’t like me mixing 333MHz with 266MHz (although it fell back to 266MHz) or 266MHz was too slow for the CPU.
Anyway, I’m reinstalling the OS for the 4th time with just the 512MB stick in it. It’s really 448MB since 64MB is reserved for the onboard video card.