Thanks, everyone, for the suggestions received so far. Yes, I think
hardware is playing a big role in the problems this system is
experiencing. Practically since it was new, during startup it has
periodically "forgotten" about its modem or one or more hard drives or
partitions. Reboot and they come back, but the next day or next week
some piece of hardware is gone again. Since new, it has never allowed
two floppy drives to be attached, which she wants because of her college
work. It simply refuses to boot with two floppies in the system. Most
recently, the power supply fan quit after making a tremendous racket. I
replaced just the PS fan, but intend to replace the entire PS now that
the system is in for repairs again. I've considered the possibility that
ALL of these problems could be caused by a flaky PS, but the shop where
she bought the system swapped the case for her awhile back, and I
*think* they swapped the PS at the same time, so this should be a 'new'
PS in there now. (New to her system, but definitely used, which the shop
did tell her about up front.)

On the subject of power supplies, does the FIC VA-503+ need an ATX
supply? Also, the FIC web site only shows jumper settings going back to
the AMD K6/266 and this client has a 233. Will the jumpers be the same
as for the 266, except for the multiplier, which I assume will need to
be set at 3.5 * 66?

As for cheap RAM being the culprit, I'm sure that's possible, but this
system has never had a major problem with lockups or random crashing, so
I'm assuming (for now) that it's ok.

Thanks again for all of the input. I appreciate it.

Jeff Delzer


Earl Truss wrote:
>
> I guess the first question to be asked is "do you think a hardware solution
> will correct the problems the client has been seeing?"  If the answer is
> yes, you will need to rule out cheap RAM as being the cause since it appears
> you will be keeping that.  Other than that, your choices seem to be
> acceptable - still not the most expensive stuff but offering better
> performance and stability for the price.

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