[GazzaT]

Hi all.

My Patriot PT3825 has been randomly rebooting recently and giving me the "you have recovered from a serious error......". The night before last I heard 4 or 5 "Ker-klunks" and then she died. I figured it was the PSU (300W and I've added loads....) so I ordered a replacement 450W which I fitted today. I went to power up and got a breif flikker from the front panel orange LED but nothing else. No CPU Fan, no POST, no beeps, nothing at all. I shifted the PSU to another machine and it booted there no problem. Checked/swapped wall socket, power leads, stripped the system down (no RAM, Graphics card or any other card) but still nothing. I've re-seated the 20pin and the 4 pin power leads on the Mobo, same result. I wanted to check the CPU Fan but its a 4 pin and all my other machines have 3 pin so figured I couldn't. I dont have another Socket LGA775 Mobo to test the CPU or replace the current Mobo with. Any ideas?

If there is any way to check out these components please advise or any other tests that may help diagnose the exact problem. Money is an issue and I would like to avoid any expense if possible. I would'nt be sad to see the back of the Mobo but if I buy a replacement only to find the problem is the CPU I may have changed the CPU something else...... you see my problem, assuming the problem lies here in the first place. My system specs are on my signiture. If they dont show for some reason I will post seperately.

Any help appreciated.

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Sounds like a hard drive problem so far as "ker-klunk" is concerned.
As you've added extra overheads to the 300w, you've probably overloaded it. I don't mean to scare you but cheaper PSUs, when they get overloaded through too much demand and not enough juice, do tend to take everything else with them. It may well be the case in your situation.

A best bet is to take it to a decent computer shop where they'll have spare boards and what not to see if your processor works in their boards.

[Neil Jones]

Sounds like a hard drive problem so far as "ker-klunk" is concerned.
As you've added extra overheads to the 300w, you've probably overloaded it. I don't mean to scare you but cheaper PSUs, when they get overloaded through too much demand and not enough juice, do tend to take everything else with them. It may well be the case in your situation.

A best bet is to take it to a decent computer shop where they'll have spare boards and what not to see if your processor works in their boards.

[GazzaT]

Thanks for that Neil. Sounds perfectly feasable too. I'll try and find somewhere other than PC World to get it checked out. Good job I have the [bleep] thing backed up on an external that was'nt connected, lol.

Thanks for that.

[Adrenalin]

hi,

read my post, might be helpful

http://www.geekstogo...gh-t171933.html

[Neil Jones]

I'll try and find somewhere other than PC World to get it checked out.

Now there's a man who knows what he's talking about

[GazzaT]

Thanks for the reply Adrenalin. I had actually read your thread before I posted as the problem was pretty much identical, I was just hoping if there was a way of diagnosing before I replaced any hardware. I have come to the same conclusion, that my Mobo is fried. The clunking noise may well have been my hard drive and it may well be the thing that fragged the Mobo. I will have to find a new LGA775 Mobo, the problem there is most new ones wont have an AGP connector and they tend to be DDR 2 ram slots which means I'll have to replace my DDR RAM and get a new Graphics card. When you add the post and packing, it stacks up pretty quickly. Add to that that when I actually get around to firing up the new board, I may still find that the CPU is screwed as well as the SATA! At that stage I would wish I had just bought a new mahine, none of which I can really afford, lol.

Thanks for the link bud.

[GazzaT]

Hi all, just to finish this one off......

Given my upgrade worries and given the suspicion over the Motherboard, I decided to just buy and new Mobo. I went with the ASRock 4CoreDual-SATA2 which cost under £50 including next day shipping. This board accomodates both DDR and DDR II RAM, it also has an AGP slot as well as a PCIe slot which will allow me to upgrade as and when I can afford it. The only thing it doesn't have is Firewire, which is'nt a problem for me as I have another maching I use just for video work but worth noting. Also this board is an ATX and my old case is an ATXmicro! Reluctantly went to PC World and bought a Jeantech "Phong 2" ATX tower which was £50 and is suprisingly good. Worked my way through the scant manuals, powered it up and it booted first time. After adding the drivers from the Mobo CD the system went into a POST message cycle which, no matter which of the three answers you gave it came back to the same question (sorry, cant remember what the question was...... I know!). Anyway, after removing the power lead and restarting, it booted to windows and just asked me to re-activate my copy of XP. After resetting the display settings and sorting out the AC97 sound option, she was fine. No lost data, hard drive working fine, CPU fine and very happy with the new system. Sorry to go on but I know when I was researching this problem it was good to find Adrenalins post with the same sysmptoms. Hope this helps.