Paul Johnson wrote:
On 8/7/07, Tim <ignored_mailbox@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: I've been watching this thread thinking about a whole bunch of PCs here that have had the exact same symptom. My research group had 5 Dell Optiplex 270 that worked fine for 2 years, then randomly locked up. There was no pattern to the problem, systems passed memtest86. The temperature was fine. Sometimes we went 2 weeks without a lockup, then they would lock several times in a day. Finally discovered problem was faulty capacitors in motherboard. Instead of looking like flat topped cylinders, their tops were swolen, so they looked sorta like the tops of cupcakes. Then I found out that people at the Dell company were just waiting for repair requests. Because they sold a hell of a lot of those PCs. After replacing one motherboard, a machine worked great 8 months, one of the machines started to do it again. I went through the usual crap--all that stuff you have been doing. I got to the point where I could not depend on it to do anything. Discovered problem was the main power supply was failing. It supplied enough power to boot and run, but apparently not enough for the bursts of energy needed by one of the IDE drives, and when that drive freaked out, it made the whole system lock up. Maybe this info does not fix your pc, but it may let you know you have company.
We had a notice come around work about Dell computers and capacitors some time ago.
-- Due to the move to Exchange Server, anything that is a priority, please phone. Robin Laing
