Hello
   Whenever I hear about a system that was once stable becoming unstable,
ever since the "bad capacitor batch" fiasco in which thousands of
mobos from many manufacturers "went south" I instantly reply
"Look at the tops of your caps to determine if any swelling has taken
place".  Commonly these caps have an aluminuim disc-shaped top that
usually has an "X" inscribed on it where the material is made
weaker to create a "safe fail point" as opposed to exploding. 
Swelling or worse, leakage of fluid (often solidifying after a time into a
discolored residue) is an indication that the cap has had some sort of
trouble, often shorting between one or more sections, resulting in thermal
failure.  These caps will often support a short time of working but tend to
spiral down to where they cease to work at all.  They cause all manner of
peripheral failure and especially spontaneous rebooting.

  Prior to the capacitor fiasco, first reply, especially when the
instability occurs during a change to a warmer season, is thermal issues. 
Sometimes this can be solved by merely improving airflow by cleaning out
the dust bunnies, especially those less visible ones inside the PS, and/or
moving cables out of the way (or replacing with round ones) or even a card
from one slot to another - anything to separate heat sources and/or improve
cooling airflow.  Sometimes it requires deeper work such as replacing dried
out thermal grease (and while you're in there why not consider honing the
heat sink and possibly even the CPU heat spreader by increasingly finer
degrees of abrasive paper - I stop with 2000 grit and then break out the
pumice/polish - set on a truly flat surface such as a mirror or pane of
glass, until one achieves a really flat surface(s) with a mirror finish to
improve thermal conductivity.

  Incidentally, although you probably already know this, it is worth
remembering that "stock - from the factory" isn't a guarantee of
stability and certainly not thermal performance and often what seems
logical, in terms of fan direction etc, just isn't.  It can be very
rewarding to fine tune your system thermally to better than stock and while
testing for function and efficiency after playing with fan placement and/or
direction can be somewhat tedious, it is definitely rewarding to know that
every running minute from then on will be better just because you weren't
satisfied with so-called "good enough".

  There are certainly other possibilities but this time of year, unless you
live South of the Equator, thermal is a good bet and developing the above
routine as your own set of standards pays off no matter what else may be
wrong and continues on through subsequent systems.
Hope this helps
Jimmy


> Hi,
> My system is:
> A7V880 motherboard
> Athlon K7 3200+ CPU
> 1024 MB RAM in a dual channel configuration
> LSI Logic 22320 Dual channel adapter
> Seagate 73 GB hard drive
> 3Com 3c905-tx ethernet card
> Matrox P750 video card
> 
> Symptoms:
> Initially, the ethernet card wouldn't communicate to the router.  Then
> progression to longer down time on the ethernet card.  The next
> symptom is spontaneous rebooting under XPee.  This then carried over
> to eCS (dual boot system).  Today, I notice the system, after the
> spontaneous reboot, wouldn't come back up.  The power light was still
> on but acted like it was in a suspended state - like the light is on
> but no one is home.
> 
> I've swapped the ethernet card for another of the same make/model so I
> know it isn't the original being bad as the symptoms persisted with
> the second ethernet card.
> 
> I'm not sure what else to try.  Any ideas what the cause is?
> Thanks in advance for any help,
> Daniel Lee Kruse
> 
> 
> 
> 
>  
> Yahoo! Groups Links
> 
> 
> 
>  
> 
> 


 
Yahoo! Groups Links

 To visit your group on the web, go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/os2hardware/

 To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
    os2hardware-unsubscribe{at}yahoogroups.com

 Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
    http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
 



---