Where's the Rubbish Can ??

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Where's the Rubbish Can ??

Well, Where do I begin,, I have a relative with a Packard (H)Bell 955 machine. Six years old. Running Win98, 333Mhz Kmd-6 cpu.It started to give some problems recently so he decided to try a re-format. Went thru the normal steps, bootdisk etc, ran the recovery cd, got 87% of the way thru, and died when trying to load windows. Re-tried, this time it hung at 15%, and stopped. Then to make matters worse, it would not accept the bootdisk any longer " Said it was invalid". Was told that probably the HD had some bad clusters, and was going bad. ( 8 gig) So happened I had another HD, same size so I attempted to try using it, and it installed..... Went thru the process again which proved successful. Returned the machine, booted fine, and installed the printer ( hp60c) Rebooted, then the trouble started,,,,, After it started the printer began throwing paper with no type then I got the "Fated Blue Screen" with this error number F000:0000005D Rebooted to safe mode, went thru device manager, seen no defects.Rebooted fine after I closed, and restarted........ Now it will only boot normally if I go to Safe Mode, and re-boot again. So needless to say I'm stumped..... Any help would be appreciated..... Or should it be trashed, and upgrade? Personally I would if it was mine... Thanks ::)

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I had something similar happen to me with my mom's old Packard. Stupid piece of crap. I gave up after a while. It just wouldn't work. I think the MLB went bad. So I upgraded her to an iMac Smile

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Sounds like it could be heat

Sounds like it could be heat related, like a cpu fan or something that isn't spinning up to speed.

Check the fans and make sure that they are all spinning properly and not binding up (spinning slowly).

I was gonna say hard drive, but you already tried that which is why i suggest that it might be heat.

Also you might want to try changing the memory out, it might be a flaky memory stick.

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I know the fan is noisy... St

I know the fan is noisy... Strange thing it boots fine when it wants to..Like today..Went to his home, started fine..Did this several times,, no problem..So I went ahead with reinstalling the DSL connection..Took 2 hours !! Had to fine the adapters,PPoE ethernet 300 files.... Anyway,, Got it working... It did give me the " Performing an illegal operation window" which than I had to start over. I went thru explorer opened up yahoo, then to Outlook Express, downloaded his e-mail... OK Connected, and re-connected to dsl.. OK Shut down the machine-- rebooted---Ok Did this 3 times!! So,, My Uncle sits down to give a whirl.... FAILS TO BOOT, SCANDISK STARTS,NEVER DID GET IT TO RE-START !!! I dont know.. Problem is I dont think this thing is worth all the aggrevation...Ram is old, the whole goofy machine is a reject......... Office Depot has an E- Machine, 2.7 celeron cpu, Win Xp Home, Monitor, everything for $400.00 after rebates......... Thats the answer... Then deep six the PB

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well a noisy fan means the be

well a noisy fan means the bearings are bad so yes, that fan probably isn't keeping that cpu cool. If i remember correctly, those old pentium 2s had a tendency to run hot.

Why throw the baby out with the bathwater? Just fix the fan by replacing it and I would not be surprised that it works better.

Parts for those old clunkers are dirt cheap these days so why spend 400 bux when you don't have to if all you want is a simple internet browsing workstation.

Ram doesn't get "old" and start failing. I have sticks that are close to 6-7 years old and work as well as they did when they were brand new. I'm betting that either the cpu fan or the powersupply fan or both just aren't cooling the system enough for it to work at 100 percent.

If you don't want the system, i'm sure there is someone poor who would gladly take the time to clean/replace the fans and get the system running well again, no need to trash it. (333mhz systems are quite usable with win98/2000 or even some versions of linux).

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Oh wow, i just re-read your f

Oh wow, i just re-read your first posting. Those AMD k6 cpus are SUPER senstive to bad fans. I thought you had a pentium 2, but you don't, you said you had a AMD k6.

If you have a flaky fan on the cpu (even if its just "a wee bit bad"), it WILL make your system run flaky and act all wonky.

All AMD chips (to this day) are very very sensitive to heat, much more so than intel chips but when they are kept cool, they run fine and work great.

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Wile I'm not against you for

Wile I'm not against you for working on such a junky computer such as that, there is a point when it's simply not practical to waste time on something like that. Of corce, if it's something like a bad fan, or something simple, then fix and tinker away, but don't go ripping hairs out with major problems (IRQ conflicts anyone?).

The only exeption is macintosh stuff. Don't want to make the zeliots mad now would I? Wink

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its not a packard problem

its not a packard problem, well not entirely. there propritary mobo's are crap BUT its also the amd processor, i have a k6-2 on a nice soyo Mobo and it has had a ton of problems, so i thinks it may just be a lame processor design, then again ive never had good luck with AMD, try taking the processor out and firmly re seating it, also get a better, I.E. pentium 3 cpu cooler, that worked wonders on mine although its still crap , what with its 3 hdd's ranging in size from 6gb to 3gb and only 128mb of ram, whatever. old pc's suck after a few years where as old macs age much better

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