Ethan,
It sounds like the cpu might be overheating due to either an inadequate
cooling fan on the cpu or poor air circulation in the case. Make sure the
CPU fan is working, and/or replace it with a good fan/heatsink with a ball
bearing fan. You might also want to add a case fan.
Glenn


> 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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