angryfirelord
December 15th, 2010, 03:38 AM
Hey guys. I'm having a bit of a pickle with one PC that is being as stubborn as a mule in getting it to do anything. It's an Acer M5641 that is (or was) running Vista.
About two weeks ago, the computer started having some random freezes. At first, I though it was simply a Windows Update that was conflicting with a driver. So after some trial and error with trying to get the drivers to install without it locking up, I managed to update them. At first, that seemed to do the trick.
However, a day later, the problems returned. I tried System Restore to no avail. So I figure that Vista decided to eat itself at some point in time and thought that the registry might have been corrupted. But just to be sure it wasn't anything else, I decided to run Memtest86+ on it.
Well, after an hour and 32 minutes, Memtest froze up. The screen looked like it had all static distortion on it, kind of if it was near some interference. Running it again yielded the same freezing up with no input from the keyboard and the same static lines. The only difference was the times. Some froze at 45 minutes, others froze at 3. I tried putting the memory into different slots and testing each one at a time, but they still went with the same result.
After that, I tried booting the Ubuntu live cd. I tried all of the different boot options, but the CD would never load X. It wouldn't ever load to a prompt either.
So, has anyone ever encountered such as issue? I don't believe it's the power supply as the processor is only an E2200 and everything is pretty much onboard, including the video. I suspect the motherboard might be failing, but at first glance I didn't see any bad capacitors. It would seem like a hardware problem, but I really don't know at this point.
About two weeks ago, the computer started having some random freezes. At first, I though it was simply a Windows Update that was conflicting with a driver. So after some trial and error with trying to get the drivers to install without it locking up, I managed to update them. At first, that seemed to do the trick.
However, a day later, the problems returned. I tried System Restore to no avail. So I figure that Vista decided to eat itself at some point in time and thought that the registry might have been corrupted. But just to be sure it wasn't anything else, I decided to run Memtest86+ on it.
Well, after an hour and 32 minutes, Memtest froze up. The screen looked like it had all static distortion on it, kind of if it was near some interference. Running it again yielded the same freezing up with no input from the keyboard and the same static lines. The only difference was the times. Some froze at 45 minutes, others froze at 3. I tried putting the memory into different slots and testing each one at a time, but they still went with the same result.
After that, I tried booting the Ubuntu live cd. I tried all of the different boot options, but the CD would never load X. It wouldn't ever load to a prompt either.
So, has anyone ever encountered such as issue? I don't believe it's the power supply as the processor is only an E2200 and everything is pretty much onboard, including the video. I suspect the motherboard might be failing, but at first glance I didn't see any bad capacitors. It would seem like a hardware problem, but I really don't know at this point.