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: 2004-12-24 03:27 am (UTC)Tonight, I turned the machine on before leaving the house for three hours, and I came back to a blue screen. The hex numbers are not the same as before; I would have remembered these ones. Tonight I got:
*** STOP: 0x0000007F (0x00000000 [four of those])
UNEXPECTED_KERNEL_MODE_TRAP
And then straight into the "if this is the first time..." boilerplate. Not much in the way of useful diagnostics there.
The machine is an "AOPEN mid-tower KF45A 300W" (no, I'd never heard of Aopen either). The case also has an AMD sticker on it (CPU???). My paperwork says it was purchased in June 2002. (I was misremembering it as being newer.) I bought it at CompUSA but not quite off the shelf; I think the delay was due to my desire for Windows 2000 Professional instead of XP or ME or whatever they wanted to put on it by default. I think it's otherwise a normal machine of its era. Oh, 256meg of memory.
I tried rebooting from the blue screen and just got a blank screen after the normal boot text that scrolls by quickly (so it never got to the Windows splash screen). Ten minutes later it booted normally, and I'm now waiting for another blue screen.