Can't boot friend's computer!

S

Stop Laughing

New Member
I'm at a friend's house and her computer just doesn't boot right, it often goes into a total lockup, even in the setup utility. I've gotten it to boot to a floppy a couple of times, but the longest it lasted was about 3 minutes. It did boot to Win98 on the hard drive but stopped in the middle of scandisk so I couldn't even access any controls. The power buttons (which is all I can use to reboot since Ctrl-Alt-Del won't respond) don't always power the unit up or down properly, and leaving it off for a little time seems to help, but often it'll stop in the memory test (this last time only shows 4922K OK, but I've seen it over 10000, don't know exact number). I'm sorry about the short notice, but I really could use a response within the next hour or so, I can't stay here very long. I'm gonna start checking out its connections, I'm not sure if any fans are running cause the only things I hear when I power it up are the disk drives.
 
What processor is it? I've found that the AMD K6-II can actually run for a few minutes with the heat sink having completely fallen off. Maybe it's a hotter processor (like a T-bird) with the heatsink still on it, but a frozen fan.
 
It's a pretty old computer, only a 400MHz, but it was moved recently, and she said that's when the trouble began. The processor's temp has been fine from the temp monitors in the setup (not even 40C), but next time I go over I'll see if all the fans are working properly, I'll actually bring some tools with that are actually worth anything. I'll also make sure to fully back up her hard drive properly (even if I have to put it in another computer) as this computer has all the data for our bowling association on it (she's the secretary).
 
Not only could it be the processor over heating, but i have seen
PSUs overheat and do stuff like this too.
 
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