Hi, One of my dads friends brought over one of his work computers that was having some problems hoping that i could fix it, its pretty old…
Its like a celeron at 850Mhz-1.2Ghz and its 120Mb Ram with a 30Gb hard drive. Very basic, no graphic card or sound card, all onboard.
When i turned it on it was fine but when it went to the desktop it worked great for about 1 min then it just froze for no reason. I restarted it and then it froze again at the desktop, i restarted about 5 times, then it froze and then when i turned it back on it was unable to run windows because some file in system32 was missing. So…
I decided to reinstall windows, that was sucessful until it goes to the windows loading screen when after it just shows the desktop and right away freezes. Then it usually restarts it self and reapeats the process all over again.
I have no idea whats wrong with it… Does anyone have any ideas. So far i came up with it may be that the ram could be corupt. But otherwise im clueless.
Sounds like RAM to me. See if you can scrounge up a spare stick (or just borrow one from somewhere for a few minutes) just to see if that helps at all.
I had a couple 1Ghz IBM NetVistas at work that would spontaneously reboot. After trying everything I could think of to isolate the problem (ram, video, etc.) I finally stumbled across an article about bad capacitors in some machines.
Apparently the particular models I had were affected. Once I stopped trying the ‘usual’ and looked at the capacitors it was clear to see they were bulging and had leaked a little at the tops. There was no mention on the IBM site, but when I got ahold of tech support and told them about the bad (leaky) capacitors they knew right away what I was talking about - sent me 2 new motherboards (even though the computers were about 4 years old).
I´m not electronic engineer, but this I tell it from own experience (has been dealing with computers longer that some forum members have been alive
Bad electricity output on your home/office can cause similar problems with your electronics… some are noticed right away, but the more problematics ones are cronic hidden problems.
For instance, where I live we have a very active thunder storm season… some times a lighting would strike directly and burn half of the building electronics (and yes, the building does have ground wiring)… that problem is easy to identify.
But there is also the problem with constantly changing voltage or partially filtered power sourges… those have an acumulative efect on your capacitors. Hight quallity components can take it longer, but in the long run they all die.
Once I had a 486 with exactly the same behavior that your dad´s computer has. After ruling out the usuall software, dust & overheating problems, I decided to take it to the repair center. 15 minutes after I was called in by the technician… some of my capacitors had swolen to twice it´s former size, some others where “bad” and acumulating more energy than they should, etc. etc. etc… cause of dead? long term exposure to a faulty electrical installation.
Remember that a capacitor is an electronic device designed to acumulate and discharge certain amount of electricy over certain period of time… on your case it seems like when you boot your computer some faulty capacitor starts charging, and by the time it is full the computer freezes.
