Stop Rebooting!

RedFury · March 11th, 2005, 09:46 AM

Hey all, got a nice little laptop to play with from my father in law ( upgraded his, and this one was giving him problems, so now it's mine/my problem

)

It's running ( sort of ) win98. It's no specific make of laptop, just a P3 700mhz system with 128mb of ram ( 8mb shared for video..up to 64 )

Before I started tinkering, it would run just fine...you could open applications, check out a few system settings, etc. However, as soon as you try to access the HDD with a program ( such as scanning folders for pictures with Picasso-neat little app from Google ), it reboots. It will reboot it seems if I tried to do anything that required accessing the drive, and also seems to have troubles with the CDROM.

I managed to install Sandra and do some benchmarks. The memory was the slowest of all the possible choices to bench against...same with the HDD. I don't remember the specifics, but I think the Ram was like 150mb/sec or something goofy like that. It was at least half as fast as the slowest benchmark choice.

I'm not familiar with Laptops, so I'm approaching this thing like a PC, but I'm not sure what I should expect. I tried upgrading the OS to Millenium, but part way through, it stopped detecting the disc in the drive and I could get it to detect/read it and had to reboot/cancel the installation.

OF course, now the system just boots to the POST screen and loops..GARH!

Anyone have a suggestion? I don't exactly have another set of laptop items I can swap with either. I ran Memtest98 and it seemed to not find any problems if that helps anyone with a suggestion of what to do next.

Oh, and the Battery is pretty toast, so I've been running it off AC power the whole time.

**Martoch** · March 11th, 2005, 09:54 AM

ACK!!!
Upgrade to ME?!?
[smacks RF with a dead fish]

Man, I call that a downgrade...I hate(d) ME for the 10 minutes that I used it. That system could easily handle Win2K, or even XP with all of the extra "stuff" turned off...why not boot to a 98 boot disk (www.bootdisk.com) and give XP a shot?
How to install WinXP from MS-DOS

I'm going to attempt the same with an old P-II 350MHz that's been sitting around for a looooooooooong time collecting dust.

**Martoch** · March 11th, 2005, 11:46 AM

YIKES! Just found out I'm working with a P-II 233MHz with 128mb RAM and XP Pro already installed...I have a few PC-133 sticks lying around here somewhere. It's running slowly, but it is running!

Any progress RF?

CORRECTION: Finally able to change the BIOS settings...the chip is a 350MHz after all. I slapped 512mb PC-133 in and she's running just fine.

RedFury · March 11th, 2005, 10:48 PM

Meh, I installed ME on a lark..but had to without upgrading from within Windows. It still does it. I can rule out that the OS is the problem. Now what? Memory seems to be fine, but that could still be a problem, although unlikely.

As soon as I click on certain actions within a program, it reboots. Picasso tries to search the disk for pictures...immediat reboot.

MrMikeL · March 18th, 2005, 04:20 PM

Are you able to run a virus scan? Sounds like you may have an infection on your HDD. Just a thought . . .

RedFury · March 20th, 2005, 12:42 PM

Well, I've run Kill disk on the HDD, ran multiple RAM tests and HDD tests. Nothing is coming up bad in both those dept's. I could run a stress test on the CPU, but I don't really think anything is going to show up there either. I can run just about anything off the CDROM, although this laptop sometimes has a hard time finding it ( ie. loses a connection or ?? while installing a program ) That's really my only clue, other than it just seems that my benchmarks seem pretty slow for data transfer rates.

It's a 700mhz P3 with 128mb of SDRAM, so I expect it to be slower than my 2500+ Barton and 512mb of PC2100.

When I had an OS on the system and ran Sisoft Sandra on it, the benchmarks were lower than comperable systems. What could be slowing down my bandwidth?