kony said:
How far into the POST or boot sequence does it get when it
freezes, and is it always at the same point?
It will either beep then load up normally, or if I don't get a beep, it will
just sit there, sometimes with the 'busy light' on, sometimes in the middle
of the memory check, sometimes not even that far. Then I shut it off and
start over. When it will get to the beep, it will successfully load.
If you can, get it into the bios menus and check the
voltages there, or of course with a multimeter would be even
better during the moment after it's powered on, seeing if
the PSU rails get up to correct voltage range quickly.
I can try that...I've even tried leaving the PC 'live' so the 3.3v rail(?)
will constantly have power but it makes no difference. I have a master strip
that I turn off which removes all power to the PC and the PSU - which
resulted in my having to prematurely replace the battery.
I had an A7N8X that something similar happened to...
actually still have it, need to rip a couple custom
heatsinks off to reuse them some day.
Either the southbridge itself or a part very near it (I
never found which part was to blame) seems to have a cracked
solder joint, after pulling my hair out trying to figure out
why it began failing to post more and more often, I
eventually got out a hair dryer and by isolating where the
airstream hit the board I narrowed it down to heat applied
on the southbridge. A visual inspection didn't show
anything so I just abandoned it, reused the CPU in another
socket A board and upgraded everything in that system.
I have suspected this very thing, being familiar with circuit boards in
other non-PC applications and am suspicious of the temperature differential
symptom being affected by a cold solder joint, crack or something similiar.
Finding it tests the patience of Job. It never fails in the warmer months,
only when the weather turns sharply cold.
That might not be the same problem you're having though,
colder temps can cause circuit board cracks to go
intermittent, as well as other contacts though this isn't
much of a temperature change. It can also degrade the
performance of capacitors, the PSU was a prime suspect but
with it replaced the motherboard or video card capacitors
would be two of the next suspects. Bad capacitors that
don't work well enough when too cold will not necessarily
look vented or different in any way.
I am also wondering if maybe the PSU isn't quite big enough. I'm running a
floppy, 3 HDs, a DVD and CD burner, a modest video card - e-GeForce 6200,
recently replaced, and a video capture card and sound card. 1g. of Kingston
memory (swapped around the slots).
Of course it's also possible the PSU has gone bad, it
happens. What is it's 5V current rating? A7N8X,
particularly with the later generations of skt. A CPUs, a
bit of overclocking, and/or a semi-powerful gaming video
card can require a PSU with a fairly high 5V current rating
(moreso than most anything before or after it in the PC
market). If the PSU was borderline at supplying enough 5V
current and the lower temperature degrades it a little, that
could in theory make the difference.
Another interesting point, Asus Probe says 4.757v with intermittant drops to
4.73v. The old PSU gave the same reading on the 5v rail, whereas the most
noticeable difference is in the 12v rail. This new PSU reads 12.35v with a
rare blip up. The old PSU would never read above 11.75v.
Another possiblity is the battery is running low, some
boards and IIRC, that one, won't POST at all once the
battery gets too low though that doesn't seem directly
related to temperature when it had trouble a year ago then
worked fine for that whole year till now.
Thought of that, too, and replaced the battery sometime a little over a year
ago because it died and I was losing my settings. But everything has to be
suspect with this scenario.
Unless you get lucky, the most obvious thing to do is just
swap out parts till you find which it was.
Yes; refer to the patience of Job part!
