[OT]Dumb hardware question

[jerry]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jerry Feldman" <gaf at blu.org>
To: <discuss at blu.org>
Sent: Saturday, May 10, 2003 1:45 PM
Subject: [OT]Dumb hardware question

> My wife's windoz system freezes randomly and I don't believe it is
> software. I put in a new power supply, but that did not fix the problem.
> I reseated the boards. However, I have not been able to reseat the CPU
> (AMD Athalon). The heat sync is clipped on and I don't want to use brute
> force to pull it off. With this little info, anyone want to take a quick
> stab at advice to remove the heat sync.
>
> (My next step is to bring up Knoppix and see if I get a freeze here).

You may already have looked into this; I had purchased an Athalon and a
Duron CPUs along with 2 MSI K7T Pro 2A mobos back in 2000.

One died in 02/2002 and the other in 03/2003. They both had this problem:

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/feb03/ncap.html

They both started with about a week's worth of random lock-ups, degenerating
to the point where it no longer POST. They both have the same set of
capacitors explode. A quick check of all your capacitors and a Google of the
motherboard brand + type may save you some time and give you a chance to do
backups.

Jerry M