VOGONS


First post, by Elia1995

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Hi, I never ever had a single problem with this ASUS TUV4X system, nonetheless my best Windows 98 PC so far, with 512MB of SDRAM and the epic Intel Pentium III Tualatin CPU.
But since Sunday, it's been giving me nightmares, the PC turns on just fine, fans spin, disk drives read and actually reads the hardisk and loads Windows 98, I can hear the HDD reading sound, which can't happen if the motherboard wouldn't boot, but I get no video and no POST beep sound effect anymore.
Since then, I tried several things (and that's the reason why I held up on this before posting here): first of all, I tried with another monitor, I also tried to swap the GeForce FX5500 with some other AGP and PCI graphics cards, such as my nVidia TNT2, S3 Trio and S3 ViRGE DX (PCI), I also used an eraser on the contacts on both RAM sticks and every Graphics card I tested in there.
I tried with another PSU, I closely checked every single capacitor on both motherboard and graphics card and they're all intact.
I cleared the CMOS by shorting the 2 solderings below the CMOS battery slot with the label "CLRTC".
Sometimes it randomly works, for example yesterday it booted 2 times just fine and on the third try, it began doing this nonsense madness again, same thing in the evening, but only once.
Thus, the CPU and everything else in the system is fine, if the CPU were broken, it would never start, not even those few times it worked yesterday and since the CPU works and everything else works, I want to absolutely narrow down this problem and breathe life into this P3 again and I'm pretty sure it's possible, since it's not totally dead, but I ran out of ideas and now it's your turn, Vogons.

Currently assembled vintage computers I own: 11

Most important ones:
A "modded" Olivetti M4 434 S (currently broken).
An Epson El Plus 386DX running MS-DOS 6.22 (currently broken).
Celeron Coppermine 1.10GHz on an M754LMRTP motherboard

Reply 2 of 4, by Elia1995

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It might help a bit, with some fresh new capacitors, but since none of them is bulging, why may have they died inside without reason and from a day to another ?

Currently assembled vintage computers I own: 11

Most important ones:
A "modded" Olivetti M4 434 S (currently broken).
An Epson El Plus 386DX running MS-DOS 6.22 (currently broken).
Celeron Coppermine 1.10GHz on an M754LMRTP motherboard

Reply 4 of 4, by gdjacobs

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Elia1995 wrote:

It might help a bit, with some fresh new capacitors, but since none of them is bulging, why may have they died inside without reason and from a day to another ?

Caps not bulging is no assurance that some haven't failed. However, bulging caps tell you that some for sure (the bulging ones) have failed.

All hail the Great Capacitor Brand Finder