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Strange system problems.....can someone please help me?

C

Cougar

Golden Member
Ok I'm trying to fix someone's computer and I have no idea how to go about diagnosing it. Here's what I was told was wrong with the system: It would lock up as soon as it started windows. As soon as it would ask for the username and password it would just completely freeze. No errors or anything, just a hard lock. Well, as I was trying to diagnose it I plugged in my ps/2 mouse and things got strange because when I turned the pc on it would just sit there and beep at me and give me no video signal. So I turned it off and then on again and it was still beeping at me. So the only way I found to get the system to work again was to clear the cmos and plug in a serial mouse....not a big deal but it's still strange.

So once I had the keyboard, mouse, and monitor plugged in I turned the system on and went into the bios to make sure that everything was set up right, and it froze while I was in the bios. So I just rebooted the system and got back into the bios and just checked to see if everything was alright but I noticed that the processor was being identified wrong. It's a celeron 333 (i checked the chip itself so I'm positive that's what it is) but the bios was set up for a celeron 233. So I decided to change it to 333 and reboot the system, when lo and behold it started beeping again and I got no image on the screen. So I went through the process of shutting down, clearing the cmos, and booting up again in order to get things to work.

Now with all that said and done I decided to go into the bios one more time and see if anything else was out of whack (I left the cpu setting at 233 since I didn't want to have to clear the cmos again). I noticed that instead of having agp be initialized first for video it had pci set to initialize first, so I decided to change it to agp and rebooted and again it just sat there and beeped at me with no video signal. Now the video is built onto the board but it is agp nonetheless so I know that I didn't have the setting wrong or anything. So again I cleared the cmos and fired it back up and everything was working fine.

So I quickly deduced that any changes I made in the bios would result in a beeping computer so I left everything as it was and reformatted and reinstalled windows. Everything was going fine for a while but then it just locked up again. I decided to boot into dos and see how stable it was there and so far it's been running fine. I loaded up doom2 (my god what an ugly game) and it's been running now for almost 60mins. without a hitch. So at this point I'm really baffled.

The fact that I can't make any changes in the bios, or use a ps/2 mouse leads me to believe that the motherboard is bad or something on the motherboard. Now since I can get into windows (when the computer acutally boots up instead of just beeping at me) but it freezes eventually then it leads me to believe that it's some driver or program error. Obviously the fact that dos seems to be running fine leads me to believe that again it's something native to windows. Now I would be content believing that win98 just didn't like this machine, but windows has nothing to do with the bios and ps2 problems I encountered since all that stuff happened long before windows started to load.

So does anyone out there have any idea what exactly is causing windows to freeze or keep the computer from booting up or allowing me to make changes in the bios? Is it a bad equipment, faulty drivers or a little bit of both?

Here's the system specs:
CPU: s370 celeron 333 on a riser card
MB: Sis based motherboard model #P6SE-ML (the computer itself is made by PowerSpec)
RAM: 32mb, appears to be mosel vitalic (I tried my own memory and it didn't help at all so I don't think it's the memory)
Video: integrated
Audio: integrated
Modem: integrated
HDD: 4gb (western digital I think)
CD-ROM: IMES 24x

Sorry for the long post, but I hope someone out there can help me 'cause I'm stumped.
 
Try replacing the CPU, first of all, does that motherboard officially support that celeron? Being that it's clocked at 233 instead of 333? It might not, but that's where I would start....even if it's running Doom2 just fine. The next thing I would suspect is a problem on the MB, but not likely...more likely is that you are installing a corrupt windows somehow....if it can't read certain parts of the CD or something that could occur. What kind of system is this? Self made, or was it manufactured by some company? And did it originally have Win95 on it and 98 was upgraded?
 
OdiN...

Well, the only processor I have is a celeron out of one of my systems and I'd rather not pull it out just for the sake of this system. Perhaps I should have been a little clearer about the cpu identification thing. When the system boots up it says Celeron 333mhz, but it's in the cpu section of the bios where it says 233mhz. It's virtually impossible to be a corrupt windows cd because it's my version of windows and I have it on the computer I'm typing on now and my other computer and I've never had any problems with it.

The computer itself is made by powerspec (seems like a fairly large company). Neither I, nor the owner of the system had anything to do with the building of the system, I'm just the one trying to fix it because his warranty is up. Here's the address for the exact unit:

system

The specs for the motherboard the system uses are here:

motherboard

If you look at those specs it says "Supports Celeron, Pentium II, or Pentium III CPU cartridge". So it sounds like the motherboard accepts the cpu so that shouldn't be an issue. Also it originally shipped with win98 so I don't think it is an incompatibility with 98.

I thought for a while that it might be heat, but there's nothing in that system that gets hot at all so I doubt it's that. I dunno, I can't figure this thing out.
 
jinsonxu....

Well, I looked on powerspecs site and I didn't find any bios updates. All I found were updates for the built in sound/modem/video. So I downloaded and updated the drivers, but that still doesn't help me since the computer sometimes just won't boot up. It will just sit there and beep at me.

Last night I had my memory in the system and I had doom2 looping for a about an hour or so and it worked just fine so I decided to press my luck and see how windows would run. Well, believe it or not it was actually running stable for hours and hours. So I naturally assumed that somehow his memory was bad. Well, after leaving the computer off all night I came back to it this morning and the only thing I did was put the case cover back on, and it strated beeping at me again. So I took the case cover back off, cleared the cmos and fired it up and it worked. So once it fired up I deiced to go into the bios and detect the drives and then save and exit. Well, it detected the drives just fine, but when I saved and rebooted it just sat there and beeped at me.

So here's where I stand now. I don't really care about windows' stability at this point. I have to figure out why this system keeps dying on me (which is probably the reason that windows keeps freezing). Since the system wouldn't boot up this morning even with my memory in it, I somehow doubt that it's the memory that's at fault here. I know that if I plug in a ps/2 mouse or make any changes in the bios the system will refuse to boot so right now I'm either leaning on the board or the cpu.

Is it possible that maybe one of the built in compnents (video, sound or modem) is somehow killing the system? Next time I turn it on I'm planning on disconnecting the floppy drive, hard drive, and the cd-rom drive so I can try and narrow this down, but I somehow doubt that they are the cause of this problem.
 
Seems weird. How about changing the power supply? Also, the AGP or PCI option for the first video adapter isn't important.

When did this problem first start? What did the owner do? Also, get out all the cards except of course, the video which you say is integrated. While you're at it, consider leaving the case open. This problem looks like some sort of grounding prob. I'm not exactly sure. But you can give it a try.
 
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