rkoenn
Senior member
I am a system builder and run a small business from my home. I just had an interesting experience and was wondering if anyone else might shed some experience on this problem. I built a new system for a customer using an ECS K7S5A board, Duron 1 GHz, DDR memory, ATI OEM Radeon card, Maxtor HDD, DVD drive, and CDRW drive and running Win XP Home. When I first built it all went together and Windows installed fine. Then while testing it, I would get a spurious lockup in of all things, Spider Solitaire. I thought it was a fluke as everything else seemed fine so she took the machine. However, after two weeks she brought it back saying it would lock up playing MP3s. I thought it might be the onboard AC97 audio drivers so I installed an earlier driver. This seemed to solve the sound problems and she also opted for an SB Live which I installed last night. While playing MP3s in the back ground I tried the solitaire again. Ran good for about 15 minutes when a hard lock! I was very stumped. However, the only component not changed out was the Duron CPU. Being a last resort, I changed it for an Athlon 1 GHz I had. After that I ran MP3s and played Solitaire for over a half hour with no problems. So my question is, would all the "experts" here say it was the CPU? Sure seems to be. Possibly a flakey transistor or other component in the CPU that only certain conditions can kick off? Would it seem safe to say that changing it out has resolved the problem and has anyone else had anything similar ever? I have built a lot of machines and this is a first, or maybe the few other times I have had a flakey system this might have been the cause? Thanks for any further help on this issue.
