>
>So I'm finding it easy to believe that the battery in my APC unit (maybe
>10 years old?) is dying/dead and I probably need to replace the unit.
>David Gillett

That would cause the UPS to start beeping annoyingly, but it would 
not cause the motherboard to stall at POST. The APC software can tell 
you if your battery is good or bad. Of course, the simple test for 
this would be to unplug all your USB devices and see if the problem 
is solved. If so, you can start re inserting them, one at a time to 
see if anything happens.

  I had a similar problem a couple of months ago that turned out to 
be a couple of bad Patriot RAM DIMMS. In my case the hang was 
intermittent, and I was having other symptoms, like spontaneous 
reboots from within windows. The USB chip loads right after the POST 
RAM test which gave the appearance of a USB device problem.You can 
always run Memtest to check the RAM. There is a free version 
http://www.memtest86.com/.

There are two other instances where I have experienced continious 
POST hangs. In both cases it involved 5 year old plus motherboards. 
They would always hang at post but if I restarted right away they 
would complete post, and load windows. I never did figure out why 
they were behaving this way, however, I suspect it was some kind of 
thermal issue on the motherboard.

Mark Rode  

            Do you want to signoff PCBUILD or just change to
                    Digest mode - visit our web site:
                   http://freepctech.com/pcbuild.shtml