System testing

[Bob Jonkman]

Take the cover off the case and see if you have any popped capacitors.
Bad caps can result in all kinds of intermittent, non-reproducible
behaviour.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

Generally, capacitors can be replaced and the motherboard is as good as
new.  But it's a finicky job, and often the affected motherboards are
old enough that you'd want to replace them with something shinier anyway.

--Bob.


Bob Jonkman <bjonkman-w5ExpX8uLjYAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>         http://sobac.com/sobac/
SOBAC Microcomputer Services              Phone: +1-519-669-0388
6 James Street, Elmira ON Canada  N3B 1L5  Cell: +1-519-635-9413
Software   ---   Office & Business Automation   ---   Consulting



On 12-11-23 11:18 PM, Giles Orr wrote:
> I have an older system - Gigabyte motherboard, Core 2 quad processor.  It
> was my desktop up until a couple months ago - but it had become
> progressively more unstable and daily crashes were the norm.  Now I have a
> new desktop and I'm willing to subject the old system to any and all tests
> to determine what's wrong - I'd like to continue to use it.
> 
> About the only thing I _have_ tested is memory with memtest86+, and this
> doesn't appear to be the problem (although I'm impatient and should
> probably run it longer than an hour).  I've downloaded UBCD, StressLinux,
> and some others - but don't entirely know what to do with them.
> 
> So I'm hoping the list can tell me what tests to run and in what order,
> what to look for, and how to interpret results.  Most of my experience has
> been with fairly obvious problems - ie. this is a network card problem,
> this is a bad stick of RAM - and I really couldn't see a pattern or
> probable cause to the random crashes.
> 
> Thanks in advance.
> 

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