Sean Jeffries wrote:
>
> I have an old Pentium 233-MMX machine that has a bad habit of killing hard
> drives.   Twice now hard drives that I have put in the machine have gone
> bad.  The drives run fine at first, but after a couple of days of normal PC
> operation, the drives start making a funny noise when I power the machine
> on.  The noise is a kind of clanking sound at an interval of maybe three
> times every two seconds.  The machine of course can't read the hard drive
> and won't boot.   The first time this happened I thought I just had a bad
> hard drive, but then I put a brand new drive in and after a few days it
> started doing the same thing.  Both drives were Maxtors.  One was an older
> 2.3 GB drive, and one was a 6 GB drive.   When the PC did run, prior to the
> drives going bad, it would run fine at first but would shortly start getting
> a lot of invalid page faults.  Once the hard drives have started making this
> sound, I have not tried to put them in another machine to test them, but
> could do this if I absolutely need to.
>
> Here's the specs on the machine:
>
> Intel Pentium 233-MMX
> 96 MB RAM
> Creative 3D-Blaster PCI video card
> Soundblaster AWE-32 ISA  sound card
> Generic 56K modem
> Hitachi 6x CD-ROM
>
> Thanks...
> Sean Jeffries
>
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Too much memory is in the machine.  I believe it causes to much
speed.  Try reducing the memory from 96 to 24 megs of ram or 32
at the most and also take out windows 98 and put in windows 95.
But try reducing the memory first.  Also get away from Maxtor and
try seagate or Ibm smaller hard drives between 200megabytes and
800 megabytes because the big hard drives are not suited for
older computers with weak motherboards.

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