Motherboard dead?

I don't know but I've been told....Windows is tied to the CMOS/BIOS when XP Home is registered. So when you change to a new MB (and therefore a new CMOS/BIOS) you run into Gates Gang Hell to re register your legal Windows XP Home. I may remember wrong but think you said you had XP Home. Good luck.

Had a very similar problem to yours a few weeks ago. Dell Inspiron 531S, Viewsonic A90f display. Unpredictable display crashes. Sometimes display could be coaxed to come back on view after 20 or 30 minutes. Swapped to Dell monitors several times. Every time, Dell monitor showed only "out of frequency range " or something like that. About to scrounge up old video card when lazy self thought of applying reset back to older system config. Was using fairly high resolution @ 75 refresh rate during crash episodes. Several restarts later, system became stable again. Somewhat lower refresh rate. But, no crashes for a good number of days now.

 

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I read that the registering process is not that complicated. The OS originally came with the computer, and I don't recall registering it. I am probably just going to run a clean install using an old HD, if it let's me and later if the OS and hardware are all running OK, switch back the HDs.

Thanks for everyone so far for the help. I don't mind tinkering with computers as long as it can be done fairly painlessly.

Hm, I just got a new idea. If there is a problem, can I put Linux on it first and if Linux is running OK, I would try to put XP back? Linux should be able to run on a new Mobo without problems, right?

 

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OK, took pics and video, took notes and removed the old mobo. Rather painless. Just waiting for the new mobo to arrive. Questions:

1. How do I know if I need to apply the thermal paste or not? I guess if the new mobo has instructions, that will tell me. Also I guess it could run without paste for a while...

2. Once the new mobo is installed, should I try to run with a HD if it works out of the box or just go with the reinstallation of XP? I think I will give it a try just to see what's going on....

 

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Did the CPU have paste on it?

 

ALWAYS ALWAYS apply thermal paste. If your old mobo didnt have any than the guys whom built it crapped out on you and did a half fast job and its no wonder its having problems.

I would suggest arctic silver thats the best, but any old thermal paste will do.

you HAVE to have thermal paste, basically, it is a heat conductive paste that takes heat from the top of the cpu to the bottem of the heat sink increasing the thermal conductivity.

But applying the stuff is easy.

There are two ways, one with one of those cardboard razors, use it like a brush to spread it thin.

The other is to put a rice size piece of the paste dead center on the cpu, and take a glass slide from a microscope and press down onto it until it gets close (like 1/8 to 1/16 of an inch) to the edges of the cpu, arctic silver is conductive of electricity so you dont want to overrapply.

After that you are done, also, to remove old thermal paste (which you want to do, simply because it wears off after a while, its like going to the car center to get your wheels rotated and not bothering to align them, its not absolutely necessary but it should be done.)

 

What would he add paste to? Doesnt the cpu already have a heat sink?

 

john, the paste goes between the cpu and the heat sink, the idea is to put the paste on top of the cpu and than put on the heatsink, it function is to go between the two and conduct heat from the cpu to the heatsink, because without it, the heat would have to conduct through a layer of air that would form between the two which would be very, very unconductive.

 

I'm assuming he/she took off the heatsink when removing the cpu from the motherboard.

 

whoops, forgot about that.

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I agree that paste should be used. I used to use a matchbook cover and remove the old paste with alcohol.

 

Yes I did and there was a little paste, but the area is very little...Alright, will add paste....

 

Make sure you dont add too much paste. Ideally, the best conductor is no paste and a very smooth surface between the CPU and heatsink, but because there can be a little roughness (not visible to the eye) then paste is used to esentially fill any pockets of air in the contact (again, these pockets are not visible by eye). So you want to put as little as you can and really smooth it on flat.

 

wat? no the ideal conductor is the paste, you want the paste to cover as much of your cpu as possible.

 

take off the paste that was on there.

 

No the ideal conductor is direct contact between the CPU and the heatsink. The reason why there has to be paste there is that the two mating surfaces of processor and heatsink aren't flat. They may look flat. They may even have a mirror polish. But, on the microscopic scale, they look like a scale model of the Andes. And the mountains on one item do not match the valleys on the other.

Without thermal transfer compound, everywhere heat sink metal doesn't mate with CPU package material is a teeny-tiny air gap. Air is a good thermal insulator.

All the paste does is fill in the gaps. Slathering too much paste all over the contact area is counter-productive.

 

Alright, the swap worked just fine and I got the video signal back and I can access the boot menu and the BIOS. It was rather painless and easy, except putting back the heatsink, I had to mess around with that...Used the thermal compound.
Tried first the original HD, but got an error, then tried to Restore with an old HD, but again the same error. It is a nice blue screen saying

PAGE FAULT IN NON PAGE AREA

*** STOP: 0x00000050

My guess is that the BIOS needs some update and should have saved some data, before the whole process although that was kind of impossible with the machine going dead without notice.

So now I am tinkering and trying to either format the old HD or reinstall or restore XP.

 

Sure you plugged in the memory properly?

 

hmmm, that is strange. try powering up without the drive attached and you should only get a blank screen, not blue, tht say no boot device found.

 

Most likely it's error on your hdd, and should be able to be repaired with a windows xp installation disk. I prefer a clean install...but if you want to try a "repair install", it will just replace all of the windows files, and leave all of your programs and installs in tact. Just boot the XP installation disk. On the first screen hit "enter" to install, then hit f8. On the screen where you select the partition, select your existing partition. It will then say "searching for previous windows installations" or something like that. If it finds your old install, hit "r" to repair it. If that doesn't work..go back and delete your old partition, and start a new one, and just do a clean install.

 

As I said I have an old HD that can be reformated or wiped out, no problem. So I am not against clean install.I have tried the Ubuntu disk, running it from the disk it passed the language choice than stopped with a bunch of error messages.
I also removed the battery from the mobo (I think this action resets it) and put it back, no improvement.
There are 2 pieces of 1-1 G memory sticks I also messed around with them, assuming maybe one of them is cracked or something. So far nothing.

Oh yeah, when I try to run the original HD and XP I choose Safe Mode (doesn't matter I get the same with other modes) but when XP is trying to load I get:

<Windows root>\System32\ntoskrnl.exe

is missing and I should try to load/find that first.

 

TRy the link in post #5.

http://sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=94551