How to tell if your processor is bad

[Cybergeek]

Okay here is what happened. About 6 months ago I downloaded Slackware 7 image file. I burnt the image to a cd, and when it was finished I opened the cd. The only thing on the cd was an endless/looping folder, and it locked my computer up after about 3 clicks. When I restarted my computer, all the devices in my device manager was gone/deleted, so they were re-detected. After that I went to my start menu, and it was empty. I reinstalled windows, and kept getting errors when ever I ran basicly everything from note pad to Internet Explorer to, (all) 3d games. I zerod the dive out and left it sitting naked (everything was off the mother board including the battery) for about 4 days, just incase it was a virus. Put everything back together and messed with the bios, and found out that my HD's were not being detected right, so I played around with it for a while, and played around with maxblast since it is a Maxtor HD, and was able to get it to reconize properly in the bios. I then reinstalled windows once again, and this time it worked for about 2 weeks with out a glitch. After the 2 week period it started to lock up again with lot of errors. I then found out that the HD's were not being detected properly again. Being very frustated I took the motherboard back and got a new one. I reinstalled everything again and things worked fine for about 1 month, and then I started getting errors/lockups once again. I resorted to reinstalling windows about every 2 weeks with norton ghost.

Before any of this started I had no problems at all. I was able to run anything I wanted to and it was very stable.

So that is what I mean by a CD nuked my processor!

System specs
soyo 5ema+ MB with newest bios update
amd k6-3 processor
27 and 30 gig HD both maxtor
256megs of ram
Diamond MX300 Sound Card
Diamond StealthIII s540 graphics card
IBM win modem ISA 56k v90

 

[slatt01]

The usual sign that the processor is fried is the famous Windows Protection Error which is a sure sign that something in the hardware is broken.

I have never seen this error occur for any other reason, I've seen a faulty Cyrix CPU and a faulty Intel Mobo fail during a Windows98 install, usually after the second boot. Try doing a clean Windows install to see what happens as this seems to be the best way to see if the hardware is faulty.