Hey guys and gals,
I need some help. My work machine which has served me for almost 6 months has decided to die on me. It has the mobo I mentioned in the title, an 866 Pentium III and had Win2k installed on it.
It was running just fine until Saturday, when I installed Platex, then did a reboot... Well, I wanted to, but the machine just stopped right around when it was supposed to restart with the VGA BIOS info. The screen was totally blank, did not respond to Ctrl+Alt+Del, and even when I tried a forced power down (holding power button for 4 secs) it did not turn off. So I yanked out the power cord. Then I restarted the machine only to hear the strangest warning sound ever emitted by a computer. It varied between a high and a low frequency, but the time it took to switch between the two frequencies did not seem to have any pattern to it. After that it just went dead and did not respond anymore.
I suspected CPU failure so I pulled out the CPU and had a look at it. I found no visible damage (burns etc.), but noticed that the heatsink had one of those despicable heat pads for heat transfer. Since I had no thermal paste with me I just decided to pop the sink back on as it was and give it another go. This time the machine turned on, but the CPU was running at exactly half of its designated speed - 433 MHz. It actually booted into Win2k, but I turned it off right away because I knew the head pad was not helping. Another reboot and the machine stopped responding again.
Now, here is what I fear... I had that machine running UD basically non-stop since I got it. Is it possible that the CPU just slowly died on me because of that stupid heat pad? Will thermal paste bring it back to life? What does it mean when a PIII throttles back to half its operational frequency?
Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
I need some help. My work machine which has served me for almost 6 months has decided to die on me. It has the mobo I mentioned in the title, an 866 Pentium III and had Win2k installed on it.
It was running just fine until Saturday, when I installed Platex, then did a reboot... Well, I wanted to, but the machine just stopped right around when it was supposed to restart with the VGA BIOS info. The screen was totally blank, did not respond to Ctrl+Alt+Del, and even when I tried a forced power down (holding power button for 4 secs) it did not turn off. So I yanked out the power cord. Then I restarted the machine only to hear the strangest warning sound ever emitted by a computer. It varied between a high and a low frequency, but the time it took to switch between the two frequencies did not seem to have any pattern to it. After that it just went dead and did not respond anymore.
I suspected CPU failure so I pulled out the CPU and had a look at it. I found no visible damage (burns etc.), but noticed that the heatsink had one of those despicable heat pads for heat transfer. Since I had no thermal paste with me I just decided to pop the sink back on as it was and give it another go. This time the machine turned on, but the CPU was running at exactly half of its designated speed - 433 MHz. It actually booted into Win2k, but I turned it off right away because I knew the head pad was not helping. Another reboot and the machine stopped responding again.
Now, here is what I fear... I had that machine running UD basically non-stop since I got it. Is it possible that the CPU just slowly died on me because of that stupid heat pad? Will thermal paste bring it back to life? What does it mean when a PIII throttles back to half its operational frequency?
Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
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