Totally stump, second opinion welcome

[mrconfused]

A couple of months back i had this machine and it would freeze up at startup and totally lock. At first all signs pointed to a bad motherboard(bad pci slot/slots) but in the end the soundcard was removed and all was fine. The sound card was not replaced. Whole machine was reformatted and the OS(win98) was reinstalled.

Fast forward to a couple of months later. A couple of days ago i installed a copy of(a copied)photoshop. 2-3 days later a video editing program that was used nearly daily(and never froze) froze not once but twice. Programs now either froze/lock along with the desktop or would reboot the system. This was just the beginning. Things got worse.
Soon the machine would reboot into the bio's everytime it would crash or if a manual restart had to be done. Finally i get the error "checksum failed -defaults loaded" I went out and got a battery to replace the one that was on the board. I then defrag all the drives, download Pc-illian and ran it. No viruses were found, and all the drives were defraged. Still using random programs for random amount of time can freeze the machine or send it into what appears to be a frozen sleep mode, or reboot the system straight into the bios. Pressing the restart button manually would result in the screen going pitch black with no signs that it actually went through with a restart(most of the restarts resulted in that) or it would boot the system up in the bios. The only way to get back to the desktop was to totally shut the machine down from the battery power on switch, wait a few mins then power it back on using the battery power on switch.

I am thinking that it's probably a corrupted cmos chip because of the "checksum error defaults loaded" message i got. But since my problems happen a couple days after i installed photoshop it seems like that might be a cause somehow. It could be a bad power supply but i'm not sure.

The only thing that i am sure of is this. Letting the machine defrag for 4 hours or downloading the anti-virus for 2 hours does nothing to the machine. what i mean by that is none of the problems i mention from above appeared when i did those two actions.

Any help would be great.
Mrconfused

 

[mrconfused]

I disabled all power management in the bios, ceh4702.

As of right now i can't even get into the command prompt anymore. As of last night i shut the machine down, waited for at least 10 minutes then powered it back on. I had a win98 boot disk in the drive and it won't even boot from the disk. The screen remained black and the light on the monitor went from green to orange.

"many boards that after a reset, do not come back on until power is unplugged for some time"

That is a very interesting fact that i didn't know Mudskipper. But it does seem to make some sense because if I let it stay off for at least a few hours it comes back up sorta okay. If i were to unplugged it, how much time would you recommend? I'd like to try it and see what happens

Thanks
Mr confused

 

[mudskipper]

Generally, just a minute or two (if that is sufficient). It just needs to dissipate all of the little capasitors (and whatnot). The longest one that I saw was maybe 5-10 minutes. That one turned out to be PS, though.

Sorry, by the way...by writing that I have seen many boards not reset properly--I didn't mean to imply that this was fine. It is a problem that should be fixed--I've just seen it alot. Those ones are usually very consistant, though. On those, if you boot to command prompt only, hit reset, it will produce the same problem as if you had reset from within windows.

If you have to leave it off for a couple of hours, then you might want to go back to the basics and check you system for heat. Even check the Heatsink fitting..... A system that does not have the heatsink on well can sometimes appear cool, but the CPU is very warm. It would be entirely possible that you run Photoshop, heat up due to CPU utilization, restart/lock up--shutting off the PC could simply be allowing the CPU to cool.

Jiminks had mentioned fans earlier...perhaps he was onto something there!

You said that RAM is almost out of the question...why? It is still possible that this is your issue.... I would take Jiminks advice and check it out. The worst that is going to happen is that it doesn't help!

Incidentally, you stated that you had an unpatched win98 install. You also said that you had 4 sticks of RAM in there...How much RAM do you have?!! Are you below 512 MB? If not, then pull out enough that you are UNDER 512 and try it again once it POSTs. You might find that your lockup issue goes away. 98 has a known issue with this!! Mudskipper
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Groucho said it best- "A four year-old child could understand this! Quick! Run out and find me a four year-old child: I can't make heads nor tails out of this!"

 

[JimInKS]

Well my "gut" feeling, based on the symptoms, is it might be the CPU. It sounds like it has slowly been getting worse over time and is heat related, ie things that stress the CPU tend to make the problem worse. In my limited experience with MB failures, they have all been catastrophic.

If the CPU has overheated then that would say you have a heat sink issue of some kind. Long term running at elevated temp can cause the kind of symptoms you are experiencing (of course a million other things can too :-( )I haven't re-read the whole thread. Does the MB have a CPU temp monitor? I assume it doesn't or it would have been mentioned by now.

 

[mylchreest]

I have had similar confusing symptoms, have you tried running with the motherboard out of the case and insulated from it. In my particular case it turned out to be a Fujitsu HDD that was on the point of failure (i.e. sometimes OK, sometimes not). Try a different HDD, see if it's stable