First post, by Tempest
- Rank
- Member
I have an Optiplex GX280 and I've been having issues with it from the get go. It's the full tower model and has 1GB of RAM in it (two 512MB sticks) and a 40GB hard drive. There are no cards or anything else in it. The first thing I did was put a new battery in it to get rid of the error message on the boot. After that I tried installing Windows XP on it and all was going well until the the system had to reboot to continue the install, after that I got a weird error (can't recall the exact message). I suspected that maybe there was some sort of motherboard error so I downloaded the Dell diagnostics and it confirmed that there was a "memory data bus stress test failure". I believe that means that I have some bad memory. So I ran Memtest86 but all the tests passed.
However during all of this I would run into random problems like the system not wanting to boot on occasion (it would turn on, but nothing came up on the monitor). Once I saw an error message that said the system shutdown due to a thermal event, so I then suspected that the thermal paste on the processor had gone bad and replaced that (it was indeed pretty much dried and caked on). Now however I can't get the system to boot at all. It turns on but gives me two short garbled sounding beeps then does nothing (these sound different than the regular diagnostic beeps). I would have thought that maybe I screwed up the re-thermal pasting (can't see how), but all the letter lights on the back are green so everything must be good.
I have no idea what's wrong now, any ideas? Lots of people say that these models have bad caps, but I examined all of them and they look fine.
--- AtariProtos.com ---
For when excellence and burnished fineries need to gently visit the warmth of your tablery