First post, by fargo
I've recently acquired a nice Dolch FxPAC luggable (all-in-one) computer with Pentium 3 600MHz and 512MB of RAM.
The computer came with Windows NT 4.0 installed, which it couldn't completely lauche! Sometimes the computer restarted during Windows boot process. Some other times it restarted shortly after the desktop appeared in a complete random manner. I thought the problem was due to a software issue. So, I wiped the hard drive and tried installing Windows 2000. Once the setup program of Win2K reached the graphical interface part, the computer rebooted immediately! I tried the installation one more time, and got the same result: the computer suddenly restarted when the setup reached the GUI part.
At that point I thought the problem could be related to the RAM or the video card. I booted the computer from FDD and ran several memory test programs. No problem was found. I even installed different RAM chips and tried to reinstall Win2K and the computer rebooted when switching to the GUI.
Since DOS runs without problems but not Windows 2000, I thought of installing Windows 98 and see! And to my surprise, Win98 was fully installed and ran without an issue! I then tried installing Windows ME and it was fully installed but suffered from random reboots after launch, just like the Windows NT.
I went to the system BIOS and disabled 'video shadow' option and Windows ME ran smoothly after! Since thevideo shadow is related to the L2 cache, I disabled L2 (external) cache from BIOS and Windows ME never had an issue!
I wanted to do further tests, so I downloaded a live Puppy Linux CD image. The Linux system failed to booth when the L2 cache was enabled, but it successfully booted and loaded its GUI when the L2 was disabled.
This is the first time I've experienced something like this! It seems there is a problem with L2 cache in the CPU, but I need to confirm it before buying a replacement CPU. Is there a program I can use to test the L2? Could it be another problem and the L2 cache is fine?
Thank you