Reply 16220 of 27798, by TechieDude
TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2020-07-15, 23:54:TechieDude wrote on 2020-07-15, 23:45:I had given away an old crappy P4 computer 3 years ago to my grandma for some light office work, but she never quite tried to use it until her boyfriend tried to hook it up a few months ago and it randomly crashed. I ended up taking it back to figure out what's wrong with it, but didn't do anything because they ended up just using his much newer (and way better!) Ivy Bridge VAIO laptop.
Anyway, I checked it today just to satisfy my curiosity. It boots to XP fine, responds properly to input, until about a minute later, it freezes. RAM and HDD are just fine after testing them. The motherboard complains of incorrect CPU microcode, so I'm gonna try swapping CPUs tomorrow to see if it changes anything.For sure sounds like a rare instance of (non-OC'd) CPU failure. I've actually only ever killed one CPU at all.
I had this Core2 E7000 series (can't remember the exact model) and I had that thing running in the high 3GHZ range at some unholy voltage and eventually it just outright shat itself. Burned a couple of contacts on the end of the CPU.
Turns out, it was the CPU after all. I swapped it with a 1.6 GHz and it worked just fine. I don't think the CPU itself is actually failed though. The PC originally had a 2.4 GHz Northwood and I thought it would be a good idea to upgrade it to 2.8 GHz back then, but didn't really pay attention to the BIOS complaining about the microcode. I'll update the BIOS later and install the 2.8 GHz CPU to check. For the record, the motherboard is an ASUS P4S533-X. Shouldn't be too hard to find a BIOS update.