The title says it all. Fixing yet another PC.
This time, it’s a P3 era PC with a 1 Ghz Celeron Coppermine cD0
But the PC is in a really bad condition. I’ve had to do a nearly complete rebuild to return this system to a working state.
1. Motherboard (branded Manli) had some bad capacitors near CPU socket (8 identical caps, one leaking)
2. The system had a really crappy power supply (very light and specs overrated)
3. One of 2 PCI133 RAM modules was bad
4. (on the software side) Windows install was corrupted (not even safe mode worked)
Here’s what I did:
1. Replaced the motherboard with Intel D815EEA (nearly a complete system rebuild)
2. Replaced the bad Samsung 256MB RAM module with 256MB Micron (Nanya OEM)
3. Replaced the power supply with a 350W Codegen I had laying around (not the best PSU, but much better than the one it replaced)
4. Added another hard drive (a ye olde Samsung 10GB)
5. Reinstalled XP
Now, some more details.
I could not install XP on this system. The setup always stopped with “Could not copy file x” or “File x was not copied correcly”. Attempting to retry the file copy had no effect or resulted in some random BSOD. Sometimes, the setup would just crash with a BSOD during file copy.
I’ve tried using my UBCD to scan the hard disk, but WinPE always crashed with some BSOD soon after booting to desktop.
I’ve spent a few hours trying to figure out what was wrong. It turned out that one of the RAM modules was bad (the system had one Samsung 256MB module and one 128MB RAM module branded Exram, 256MB Samsung was bad).
Replacing it with a 256MB Micron solved the problem.
Now I need to:
1. Install all the needed software (Office suite, media players, video codecs, etc.)
2. Restore the owner’s old data from a HDD backup.
I hope I will have no more problems with this system.