BarryMurphy
Technical User
I have a very sick computer, and recently bought a PCI/ISA POST (Power On Self Status) code diagnostic card.
Symptoms: computer runs extremely slowly; windows and applications continually stop responding, sometimes temporarily, often permanently. Internet browser (IE 6.0) is a waste of time; web pages can take hours to open, if at all, despite my disabling the "Show pictures" option, disabling Windows XP firewall and uninstalling antivirus software (and all innessential software). The only operation my PC seems to be able to handle reasonably well is typing in NotePad (typing in MS Word 2002 entails waiting several minutes after every keystroke). Did a clean reinstallation of Windows XP Professional but that made no difference. After running well for about two years, my computer is now practically useless, (was hoping to get another year's use out of it).
The diagnostic card is installed in a PCI or ISA slot; following is an explanation from the manual of what it does:
"When the machine is turned on, the hexadecimal display should show the various POST codes as the system executes (unless it has a rare BIOS that does not display POST codes).
If the machine does not boot, system POST has detected a fatal fault and stopped. The number showing in the hexadecimal display on the Diagnostic Card is the number of the test in which POST failed."
When I boot up the card display quickly runs through a few numbers and stops on 26. This is puzzling to me because my computer does boot up, albeit very slowly, contrary to the above description, which suggests that the card display should only stop at a number if the machine does not boot.
An appendix in the manual lists all POST codes for the main BIOS vendors, and includes the following information:
"Error Code – 26
Award (26)Enable slots 6;Initialize slot 6.Test protected mode exceptions."
I would appreciate some help to understand what this means.
Several times I tried scanning with Norton AntiVirus 2002, but each time it went for a few days and eventually spontaneously terminated, so it never finished scanning my entire system. However, the best it did was 101,000 files (that took about 5 days) before disappearing, and it had found no infection up to that point. I have 3 HDDs and 5 partitions and it was on the final partition and had about 30,000 files to go when it gave up. All the remaining files were mp3s, so I doubt any of those contain viruses or trojans.
I did the obvious things like checking fans, which are not unusually noisy, and the system doesn't spontaneously restart. It just seems to be extremely low on resources, and Windows itself and any other processes continually stop responding.
I know that repairs are generally more expensive than the mobo itself, but I hoped that I might diagnose it myself and do the repairs. I know that to replace it I will also need to replace the CPU and RAM (it has 768MB of DDR RAM) because newer components would be incompatible with the older ones.
Symptoms: computer runs extremely slowly; windows and applications continually stop responding, sometimes temporarily, often permanently. Internet browser (IE 6.0) is a waste of time; web pages can take hours to open, if at all, despite my disabling the "Show pictures" option, disabling Windows XP firewall and uninstalling antivirus software (and all innessential software). The only operation my PC seems to be able to handle reasonably well is typing in NotePad (typing in MS Word 2002 entails waiting several minutes after every keystroke). Did a clean reinstallation of Windows XP Professional but that made no difference. After running well for about two years, my computer is now practically useless, (was hoping to get another year's use out of it).
The diagnostic card is installed in a PCI or ISA slot; following is an explanation from the manual of what it does:
"When the machine is turned on, the hexadecimal display should show the various POST codes as the system executes (unless it has a rare BIOS that does not display POST codes).
If the machine does not boot, system POST has detected a fatal fault and stopped. The number showing in the hexadecimal display on the Diagnostic Card is the number of the test in which POST failed."
When I boot up the card display quickly runs through a few numbers and stops on 26. This is puzzling to me because my computer does boot up, albeit very slowly, contrary to the above description, which suggests that the card display should only stop at a number if the machine does not boot.
An appendix in the manual lists all POST codes for the main BIOS vendors, and includes the following information:
"Error Code – 26
Award (26)Enable slots 6;Initialize slot 6.Test protected mode exceptions."
I would appreciate some help to understand what this means.
Several times I tried scanning with Norton AntiVirus 2002, but each time it went for a few days and eventually spontaneously terminated, so it never finished scanning my entire system. However, the best it did was 101,000 files (that took about 5 days) before disappearing, and it had found no infection up to that point. I have 3 HDDs and 5 partitions and it was on the final partition and had about 30,000 files to go when it gave up. All the remaining files were mp3s, so I doubt any of those contain viruses or trojans.
I did the obvious things like checking fans, which are not unusually noisy, and the system doesn't spontaneously restart. It just seems to be extremely low on resources, and Windows itself and any other processes continually stop responding.
I know that repairs are generally more expensive than the mobo itself, but I hoped that I might diagnose it myself and do the repairs. I know that to replace it I will also need to replace the CPU and RAM (it has 768MB of DDR RAM) because newer components would be incompatible with the older ones.
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