dead pc - advice

[alltorque]

My pc at home froze the other night, and now won't get past the memory check on boot up. Occasionally it does get past this, and gets to the "starting windows XP" bit, but then freezes, sometimes with a "You have had a CPU problem......" message thrown in for entertainment value.

Seems knackered to me, but is it likely to be bios, memory, or cpu? Any clues? I think it's time for a new pc to be honest, but have seen a cheap CPU on ebay (<£5). Is it worth trying this? If it is terminal, will I be able to save my hard drive stuff? (taken me years to collect some of those beauties!)

Marc

[meeja]

I would imagine the data on the hard drive is still intact.

You could attach your hard drive as a slave to another PC, and copy all of your data off it - just to be sure.

As for the dying PC, I'm no hardware expert, but I would suspect dodgy memory as a starter.

[docevi1]

chances are your RAM is damaged/not working quite right. As a result Windows isnt' able to load and it's giving errors about damaged CPU's and the like. The first thing I'd try replacing the RAM, then the CPU.

I'd put a hefty bet that the HDD will be fine and can be simply plugged into another machine and the data rescued - afterall it was trying to load Windows which is read from the HDD.

[fredf]

I'd say it's probably the memory. If it's (sometimes) getting as far as booting XP the bios and CPU are probably OK.
It might be worth testing the memory with memtest86 follow the Windows Installation instructions on how to do this

Also take the lid off and check all the connections, clean out some of the dust etc.

Edit: 'cos i can't spell


>> Edited by fredf on Friday 16th September 14:15

[alltorque]

thanks guys!

Will check the memory - great advice there!!

:cheers:

[-DeaDLocK-]

If you have two sticks of RAM in there (and the PC was manufactured this millenium) you should be able to boot with only one of the sticks in, which helps you test.