Skybuck said:
So you wanna test a motherboard, but you don't wanna test mouses,
printers, networking/internet, soundblasters/audio chips.
Then later on you describe an "average human being".
An average human being uses all of these things which you think are
not required for testing. To me it seems you testing idea/method
is already flawed from the start.
I'll give you some background:
Our company has shipped a number of data acquisition computers based on
the Soyo SY-P4I 845PE ISA (SY-845PEISA) and SY-P4I-845GVISA Plus
motherboards over the past 5 to 6 years.
http://www2.dealtime.com/xPF-Soyo-SOYO-P4845PEISA-DDR333-A-L
The first of these boards that we used was the PE-ISA, which does not
have on-board video but it does have an AGP slot. Starting about 3 years
ago we started shipping systems based on the GV-ISA-Plus. These boards
seem identical except that the GV has on-board video (Intel Extreme
graphics or something like that - 8mb video ram) and no AGP slot.
I'm sure that all of these boards (both types) were originally
manufactured between 2003 and late 2005.
Over the past year, we've had some of the GV boards fail in the field,
exhibiting strange problems (some don't boot at all, some will partially
boot XP and then just freeze, some will boot XP and run fine for 6 to 12
hours and then either spontaneously re-boot or just freeze/lock-up).
It's likely that very few of these systems have printers attached to
them, and probably half of them are not connected to a network.
The problem does not seem to happen with the older PE motherboards (the
boards that don't have on-board video but do have an AGP slot). We have
some of these PE boards being used heavily in-house for the past 5 years
and they work great - no problems ever.
The systems that have failed have been working for at least 1 to 2
years, but the frequency of use of any given system is unknown. They all
have socket 478 Intel Celeron CPU's, 2.6 ghz speed, stock Intel CPU
cooler/fan, and either 512 mb or 1gb ram, 80 gb WD hard drive.
We don't have that many of these boards left for use in new systems, and
some of those that we do have seemed to have problems on the
construction bench in the past and were not used for one reason or
another.
I'm aware of a massive problem with capacitors that really affected Dell
around the same time that these boards would have been made, and we are
experimentally taking a few boards and changing the electrolytic
capacitors (1000 and 1500 uf) with new ones to see if that solves their
problems with operational stability.
Hence the reason for my original question, which was to seek software
that simulates medium to heavy single-user load on systems running XP.
We have to insure that these replacement systems can run for at least a
week solid with no hint of trouble before we ship them back out.
I am aware that Soyo went bankrupt or went out of business around May
2009, and I've seen some comments that they stopped making motherboards
about 3 years before that.
