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> > Thanks.  How do we determine if this is such a cpu?  He gave us the
> > computer (to use the case) and I offered to fix it.  If it is not fixable
> > we get to keep it.  He said it 'runs hot' and has voltage spikes (we found
> > neither yet, but did not do the burn-in).  He drilled holes in the case.
> > He said it worked fine for a couple of years then became unreliable as a
> > server.
>
> its hit or miss but if it was used as a server running windows (or
> linux) in the past and worked fine something else could be wrong (the
> PSU would be the first thing i would try replacing)... might also try
> a bigger fan-sink... or add a case fan if it doesnt have one

The PSU was said to have voltage spikes - how long would we want to run 
cpuburn to see if this is the problem?  There is a huge heatsink and a 
case fan already.

> > ALI chipset.
>
> i have a very old AMD/ALI system (Acer Aspire -- 200mhz k6) that while
> no longer in use i did tinker with a program called 'atm' that ran in
> win9x that issued the hlt instruction when the system was idle to cool
> the cpu (the purpose of using hlt) and all kinds of weirdness
> happened... buzzing in the soundcard, overheats with the motherboards
> voltage regulators, jittery mouse and random complete freezes... BL
> would run on that system but it didnt have the soundcard setup and i
> never ran it for more than the few minutes it took to use it to do
> something that was harder to do in DOS which is what ran 99.9% of the
> time...
This is K7.


> > A computer which originally had Win95 is coming Tuesday, which 'crashes
> > after 2 weeks' every time she reloads XP, or ME.  For use only on the
> > internet (instead of WebTV).  I will offer BL3.50 instead of XP, which is
> > probably REALLY slow on a 10 year old computer.  With Sylpheed except I
> > could not find any way to Compose - it is greyed out.  I probably botched
> > setup.

> XPlite can be used on 10yr old hardware... 2k is better tho... as far
> as it crashing every 2 weeks they probably dont have a virus scanner
> (or if they do its not a good one) or something else is messed up
> (incorrect settings with the harddrive like turning on DMA on a system
> that doesnt properly support it will mess things up at a slow pace)

Thanks for that idea.  We will check out the hardware and BIOS.  She 
probably replaced the memory and drive.  We could more easily just give 
her a newer (400MHz) computer, with linux.

> try XP again (if they have it might as well use it) but turn off
> 'write cache' on the hdds... if that doesnt help disable DMA too (had
> to do this with a laptop that runs 2k)
I had to disable DMA on two computers or linux would do it (slowly).

> a bit of fun; if the webTV device used was the MSNTV2 box its possible
> to put linux on it... youll get a set-top ~700mhz intel celeron-M
> system ;)
I will leave the box where it is, but interesting idea.

Sindi