Robin Laing wrote:
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.
I work as a civilian contractor for the U.S. Army and most of our
end-user systems are the same model. If I'm not mistaken, the majority
of the systems in use in the Army - if not all of the branches of
service - are the GX270. We don't have a large user base here (about
70), but we've already had about 25% failure w/in the last 2 months.
We're in the middle of a life-cycle evaluation and upgrade but what a
headache in the meantime! Maybe "thermal event" will go down in tech
history as one of those memes like "BSOD."
--
Casey Stamper
http://www.stampersite.com/wordpress
