old PC still freezes

[greatbiggary]

I worked for a few hours on getting it back into operation last night. It still gets a few random color pixels, but only over BIOS screens. I wanted to check if there was anything on the 400GB disk before formatting and installing MythBuntu on it. I have a cable for hooking SATA drives to the back of my current machine, but couldn't find the power

Comments

[stalkythefish]

That's RAM. Try just one DIMM in there and see what happens. Then switch it to the other one. Hopefully it's just bad RAM.

If it's the Shuttle you're testing, I hope it's just the RAM. MY old Shuttle cube started flaking and it turned out to be the power supply. Some of the capacitors had swollen and needed to be replaced. A couple on the motherboard needed to be fixed too. It was rock-stable after I fixed them.

I'd send it to you for parts, but I donated that machine to a computer recycling place last year.

[greatbiggary]

Well, it's the thought that counts, so thanks! I'll be posting again in a moment with some new findings. Might have tracked it down at last. I didn't see any swollen caps with a cursory once-over.

[aerospace]

My Shuttle's power supply went bad, too. But after having the machine 2 years and only had recently moved it to a new place where the electrical outlets and wiring seems very shady, I wasn't sure if it was the power supply going bad or forced to go bad dealing with shoddy wiring in the apartment.

I had to buy a new power supply [couldn't replace the exact one I had, had to get a 50 W increase], but it's been working fine since. And I've been pushing it with lots of graphics-heavy work all day.

Anyway, glad to hear I wasn't the only one with power supply issues. Maybe that's why I couldn't get the same model to replace the old one.

[gen_witt]

Thats most likely RAM. It could also be CPU or mobo.

[greatbiggary]

Making another post in a moment, but it looks like it's actually one of the RAM sockets :(