My roommate has an eMachine eTower 400i, which has a Florida motherboard,
Celeron 400 160 megs of PC100 SDRAM, a Creative Labs 3-D Blaster Banshee w/
16MB video SDRAM, external ModemBlaster and a Linksys Fast Ethernet card.
Anyway, one day it turned itself off while my friend was playing SimCity
3000. He turned it back on and started playing again, then it turned itself
off again. Then it wouldn't switch on at all anymore. It had been
exhibiting strange behavior for some time before the power supply went out.
Anyway, I ripped all the guts out and put it in a new case with a 300 watt
power supply and everything works except now he gets a lot of system
freezes. Like, even booting it up and not running anything, if you come
back in a couple of hours, you'll find that the system has locked up and
must be turned off and back on. The motherboard does not have a reset
connector, so the power switch must be used. He has a lot of problems
running America Online (any wonder?) and he gets disconnected far more than
one usually gets booted from AOL. One day I looked over and the screen was
slowly filling with distorted pixels making some strange pattern on the
screen. It was filling the screen little by little. These problems existed
before I last reformatted and reinstalled Win98. Thinking the freezes might
be software related, I reformatted and reinstalled for him, but the problems
are still there.
So I'm wondering if it's possible that some of the core components could
have been damaged by the power supply's antics?
It's a new case, so I suggested to him that he buy a CPU, motherboard and
memory and I can simply install these new components while still using the
same hard drive, CD-ROM, a new floppy I just installed and the same video
card and network card, plus an extra SB Live Value I have lying around. How
likely is it that anything besides the Mobo, CPU and SDRAM would need to be
replaced?
Thanks,
Ethan
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