First post, by GXL750
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Years back, I built for my mother a desktop with an Athlon XP 2000+, 1gb DDR333, 20gb Quantum Fireball hard drive, GeForce MX420 and a generic DVD burner. Sometime last year it quit booting into Windows consistently, would only cold boot (if you hit reset button or tried restarting from Windows or whatever, system wouldn't POST) and it had got very freaking noisy. Anyways by the time I got it back last week, it wouldn't boot into Windows but it would POST. I believe the problem might be related to more than half the capacitors being bulging or leaking.
Anyways, old hard drive is in my desk drawer in case any data on it is needed again. A 7200rpm WD drive is in there. With the CPU's bus underclocked to 100mhz and the cpu undervolted a little, it reboots fine and boots Windows everytime. I'm not sure what I'll do with the system but I'm going to see how long it lives from here with the current mobo, a DFI LanParty NFII. Fresh install of Windows 7 which has proven to be an interesting experience. It's usable, I'll stop my assessment there. Also, with the cpu underclocked and undervolted, I didn't feel so bad about flat out tossing the el cheapo fans that grew very loud from age. From here, I'm not sure what direction I'll go with the system but it's nice to have another machine to use as a toy again.