hardware joy
Dec. 20th, 2004 11:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cellioThus far I've been unsuccessful in getting the new machine to talk to the digital camera. I'm awaiting a response from tech support for the camera. Aside from that, the new machine is behaving splendidly so far.
My old machine (called, for the nonce, Bouncy) is now failing in the exact same way its predecessor (Doornail) did: after increasingly-shorter periods of uptime, it reboots and, more often than not, produces a blue screen. Attempts to reboot at that point always fail; turning the machine off for a couple hours and then trying again gets a short-lived boot. This says "overheating" to me, but it's not appreciably quieter than normal, so I'm guessing the fan is still running. All the usual precautions have been in place all along -- UPS, antivirus, automatic updates (OS and virus), safe computing practices... I don't get it. If I knew what I was looking for I'd pop the cases and look around. But I'm pretty clueless about hardware. (And we just had Bouncy open a couple months ago to poke a graphics card, so I know it's not full of dustbunnies. I don't think Doornail was the last time I powered it up, either.)
The questions in my mind right now are: what happened to Doornail and Bouncy, can it be reversed, and what do I do to prevent it from happening to my new machine?
Could I have a faulty UPS? Could a faulty UPS do damage consistent with these symptoms?
(Oh, and just to clarify: this failure pattern is not the only reason I replaced Bouncy; it's just the final step in a series of annoying failures. The CD burner hasn't worked in months... stuff like that. If it were just a hard drive, that'd be different.)
My old machine (called, for the nonce, Bouncy) is now failing in the exact same way its predecessor (Doornail) did: after increasingly-shorter periods of uptime, it reboots and, more often than not, produces a blue screen. Attempts to reboot at that point always fail; turning the machine off for a couple hours and then trying again gets a short-lived boot. This says "overheating" to me, but it's not appreciably quieter than normal, so I'm guessing the fan is still running. All the usual precautions have been in place all along -- UPS, antivirus, automatic updates (OS and virus), safe computing practices... I don't get it. If I knew what I was looking for I'd pop the cases and look around. But I'm pretty clueless about hardware. (And we just had Bouncy open a couple months ago to poke a graphics card, so I know it's not full of dustbunnies. I don't think Doornail was the last time I powered it up, either.)
The questions in my mind right now are: what happened to Doornail and Bouncy, can it be reversed, and what do I do to prevent it from happening to my new machine?
Could I have a faulty UPS? Could a faulty UPS do damage consistent with these symptoms?
(Oh, and just to clarify: this failure pattern is not the only reason I replaced Bouncy; it's just the final step in a series of annoying failures. The CD burner hasn't worked in months... stuff like that. If it were just a hard drive, that'd be different.)
Re: Data
Date: 2004-12-22 01:39 pm (UTC)Addendum: at 11:40 I restarted the machine, expecting it to fail quickly. I did nothing other than boot it, wondering if the heavy banging on the disk before had been related. Half an hour later I shut it down normally and went to bed.
Re: Data
Date: 2004-12-22 03:41 pm (UTC)In Win2K the hex numbers are an error (STOP) code (The caps letters are the error class), and various related information. Sometimes they're memory locations, pointers, instructions, etc. It depends on the actual STOP code. Once you search on the STOP code, you can get more info about the other numbers. 99 times out of 100, the secondary numbers don't provide additional useful info for troubleshooting.