Karl’s Asylum ... for the terminally deranged

I have endless patience with the work PCs in my care..why can’t I do the same with my own? Sigh.

I rebuilt this rig last year..it has:

AMD Athlon64 X2 3800 SFF 35W CPU
Gigabyte M61SME-S2 motherboard
2×1gb DDR2667 RAM sticks
Onboard Geforce 6200 GPU
1×80gb SATA (XP), 1×20gb IDE133 (Vista) hard disks
SATA Lightscribe CD/DVDRW

All connected up to a very nice Hanns-G 19″ widescreen TFT monitor.

It’s nothing special, it has an immense amount of “go”, it runs cold (I love the 35w CPU), it’s got a lovely 550watt PSU in it..but it is BLOODY temperamental. When I built it first, I had a different mainboard..it came defective. I got it changed out, and rebuilt it again.

It works..it MEMTESTs fine. It will run XP, Vista, XP64, Ubuntu, Ubuntu64, Server2003, Virtualbox, anything I throw at it without breaking a sweat. HOWEVER, it freezes randomly. I mean TOTAL lockup..mouse, keyboard, everything. All you can do it press and hold the power button to turn off and back on.

When you come back, XP has nothing in any event log. I thought I’d throw Vista at it and see if the namby-pamby panicky, overanalytical OS could pin down a cause. Nope. Vista does the same, and all you see is “Unexpected shutdown” notifications, and nothing in any logs as to why.

I was blaming Avast!…but even without, it does it. All drivers are updated, XP has SP2 and all updates. The BIOS has now been flashed all the way up to the latest revision F9b. I did wonder if it was a dual-core problem, so I virtualised my XP machine into a browsing virtual machine, hosted in Virtualbox. Still freezes, both the VM and the host.

Jems Turion X2 laptop doesn’t have any such issues…I’m beginning to think definetly hardware, but I can’t pin down any cause! It really makes me swear…

Vista does occasionally restart the GUI and tell me that the graphics system had failed, but then it also drops the wifi at random intervals necessitating a repair operation. It also (much to my amusement) bluescreened on an attempted hibernate, and my Vista VM utterly munched itself on application of Vista SP1.

Anyone out there got any ideas?

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 29th, 2008 at 12:15 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.