how do i know when a motherboard is dying?

[Lifer]

motherboard is a MSI K7T Turbo2 (KT133A)
here are the symptoms:

running winXP, i'm getting blue screens during browsing in IE.
not the win98 type, but the XP one where it goes "windows has detected a fatal error and has shut down to prevent damage to your system," etc.

sometimes it doesn't power up correctly, it just won't POST, monitor goes to standby after 10 secs or so after hitting the power button and just sit there as if it wasn't on, but i'll have the power and HD LED on.
after many tries of hitting the reset button to finally get it to POST, sometimes it will crash during POST - it just freezes at the screen that shows the mb, BIOS, RAM, hard drives.
and one time during POST, it did not read the correct amount of memory.

a few times in the middle of loading XP, it would go to the BSOD and give me names of files that had errors or something (like NTFS.SYS) or the BSOD would say the BIOS is not ACPI compliant.

after getting the NTFS.SYS error, i thought my hard drive was having errors or bad sectors so i swapped out to another hard drive but still nothing (I can't scandisk because I can't even boot to windows).
i can't even format/re-install XP because it'll crash in the middle of the installation process.

any ideas? sorry for the long post.

 

[0roo0roo]

no easy solution. you gotta swap out parts to narrow down the problem. it might be the cpu, it might be ram, it might be the m/b. you now know its not your hd, now do the rest its most likely the m/b though.

 

[Lifer]

well, the fact that i'm having problems just POSTing is making me lean heavily towards a busted mb.

 

[John]

Those MSI mobos have problems with leaking capacitors so check them over.

 

[Viper96720]

Test the memory

 

[Lifer]

you mean look for capacitors that are coming loose and solder them back on?

 

[John]

Originally posted by: Lifer
you mean look for capacitors that are coming loose and solder them back on?

No, I said leaking capacitor, not a loose capacitor.

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/feb03/ncap.html

 

[Viper96720]

Look for bulging capacitors or any that looks like stuff came out. May look shiny around the capacitors.

 

[capricorn]

Echoing some of what the others said, I'd believe it to be just as likely it's your RAM or CPU as it is your motherboard. I'd especially check the RAM. If you have multiple pieces of RAM, try just running with one and then the other or one of the others. Run memtest86 against each of them individually if you can get it running that far.

I had some bad RAM with one system that had symptoms pointing to a bad disk drive. It worked fine except when copying certain patterns of files from CD to the hard drive; it would lock up solid as a drum in that case. Drove me nuts for a couple weeks. Finally as a last resort before sending this system back to the manufacturer, I tried one stick of RAM instead of two and the problem disappeared. With the other stick, lock ups every time when copying those files. Replaced the RAM and all was golden.

-cap

 

[ssanches]

Originally posted by: Lifer
well, the fact that i'm having problems just POSTing is making me lean heavily towards a busted mb.

It could as well be your RAM. Recently of my DIMMs died. Before it could go dead, I used to get lockups in Windows and BSODs showing STOP errors. Also occasionally the system would not POST. Normally the motherboard beeps continuously when you have faulty RAM, however I don't know why it didn't happen when I had the faulty DIMM installed with a good one. When I swapped out the good DIMM and tried to boot up with only the faulty DIMM, the motherboard did not boot up and began to beep continously, which helped me to identify that the RAM was indeed faulty. This incident sounds strange, but I'm just narrating the facts as they happened....

 

[HappyCracker]

If it rigor mortised already, then it's dead

 

[Vich]

Hi i had EXACTLY the same problem as you, you can search for my thread intech support forum... I had a combination of a bad CPU which fixed everything, but then the mobo went bad aswell, so it could be a combo!


-Rich