I have a user with a 2 year Athlon Duron 800 system with 256mb PC133
memory, system was installed with windows ME but recently started
freezing and rebooting intermittently. I did a clean install of
windows XP formatting hard drive as NTFS. The first boot after install
the computer started for about 20 seconds and rebooted itself, did
this a few times so I put a 128mb stick of PC100 memory and had no
problems installed all apps and everything was working. Suggested to
user to purchase memory as I thought faulty memory. Replaced the pc100
with a new PC133 512mb memory stick and again the system rebooted
itself just before windows XP had fully loaded. I went into BIOS and
tried to change SPD settings but computer froze. I have since tried
other PC133 memory sticks in system and each time it keeps rebooting.
The system works fine with PC100 memory. Is this a problem with the
motherboard or is there a setting in the CMOS that needs changing -
what should I do as the user is running on 128mb at the moment and I
am not confident to tell them to order more PC100 memory in case this
is really a faulty motherboard problem.

Thanks in advance
Catherine

The problem is probably a faulty power supply unit.
Maybe the CPU fan has died? Make sure it is spinning.

(E-Mail Removed) (Catherine) wrote in
news:(E-Mail Removed):

> I have a user with a 2 year Athlon Duron 800 system with 256mb PC133
> memory, system was installed with windows ME but recently started
> freezing and rebooting intermittently. I did a clean install of
> windows XP formatting hard drive as NTFS. The first boot after install
> the computer started for about 20 seconds and rebooted itself, did
> this a few times so I put a 128mb stick of PC100 memory and had no
> problems installed all apps and everything was working. Suggested to
> user to purchase memory as I thought faulty memory. Replaced the pc100
> with a new PC133 512mb memory stick and again the system rebooted
> itself just before windows XP had fully loaded. I went into BIOS and
> tried to change SPD settings but computer froze. I have since tried
> other PC133 memory sticks in system and each time it keeps rebooting.
> The system works fine with PC100 memory. Is this a problem with the
> motherboard or is there a setting in the CMOS that needs changing -
> what should I do as the user is running on 128mb at the moment and I
> am not confident to tell them to order more PC100 memory in case this
> is really a faulty motherboard problem.
>
> Thanks in advance
> Catherine

You might want to look for swollen, leaky capacitors on the motherboard.

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