Random crashing = bad mobo?

Post by **MidnightQ4** » Fri Dec 16, 2005 12:10 am

I’ve recently been going through all kinds of fits with what appears to be data corruption. It all started 3 weeks ago when I was burning coasters with my dvd drive, where before it was working fine. Shortly after that I noticed other problems like random crashing. The problem seemed to be obiously my hard drive going bad, and indeed when I tested it with Seatools it failed the test. But then things got interesting.

I installed a copy of Win MCE 05 on a different drive, and it worked wonderfully for a few days. Then one day out of nowhere Firefox started randomly crashing. Then I noticed it was Quake4, email, basically everything would just randomly crash after only a minute or so of use.

So I thought maybe that hard drive was also dying even though Seatools said it was fine. But I reinstalled on a third drive that is only a few months old, and after only 1-2 hours I am again getting the same problem. Also during the install that third time it said that odbc32.dll was corrupted, but the install carried on anyway.

So at this point I’m suspecting that my old PSU has damaged my mobo (P4C800 Delux). I say this because I noticed that 3 of the medium sized caps inside were leaking electrolyte out the top. I replaced the PSU with a 600 watt Silverstone one so I’m sure that it is providing good power now, but frankly it ran better with my old PSU :/ Apparently something else is failing.

Anyway I guess I’m kinda bummed that my $250 mobo might be jacked. Does anyone have any suggestions for fixing these crashing problems? Does the evidence point to the mobo?

I was planning on turning this current system into an HTPC and hooking it up to my tv. Is there a good replacement mobo that would work with my 3.0 p4? I don’t need anything that awesome cause I’m going to upgrade my main box with an Asus crossfire mobo in a couple months. Basically I just need something to be a stable mobo that doesn’t need overclocking capabilities, as I plan to run it with minimal cooling being a HTPC.

Post by **Kills On Site** » Fri Dec 16, 2005 12:16 am

Ouch, that does seem to suck. If you can try different RAM then please do, whenever I hear random crashing I think bad RAM, so if you could switch it out and see what happens maybe we could narrow it down.

Post by **MidnightQ4** » Fri Dec 16, 2005 1:17 am

I think I might end up replacing my whole rig because of some $1 caps in my powersupply

Post by **MidnightQ4** » Fri Dec 16, 2005 6:54 am

Well it looks like my memory was bad. Both sticks were returning errors. With new memory now everything is working fine so far.