Hey all, I've got sort my father in laws PC which is an old PIII 600 slot one. The symptoms are random crashes and freezes. I've checked CPU temps via MBM and when idle they're hovering around 50, under load they're reaching high 50's. The CPU may not be the problem but the temps seem too high for my liking, so I intend on reseating the HSF with fresh TIM and seeing if this offers any improvement. Any advice on removing the HSF would be very nice, I can remove the fan unit easily but I am then presented with the actual heatsink. The HS is held in place by two clips in an extended U shape that pass through the CPU and seemingly into the opposite plastic facia. For the life in me I cannot find a method of removing these clips witout actually trashing them. Am I being stupid and missing something really obvious or are these things as much of a bitch as they seem? I'm a diehard AMD man and this is the first time I've actually tried to strip a Slot CPU. As I said any help would be appreciated. Cheers Ian
You'll have to replace the heatsink if you remove it... Random crashes and freezes are likely to be memory fault or hard disk failure... or possibly motherboard. Don't worry about the CPU. 50c is fine. 70-80c I would be concerned.
Cheers for that, I was unsure about the temp range on the PIII's, but if staying in the 50's is fine then I'll rule that one out. I've tested the hard drive on my second machine using PowerMax (it's a maxtor) and it's passed all the tests without a problem. I initally suspected the HD as the machine kept dropping the windows system file held in windows/system32/config/system. I'm screwed for testing the ram though as it's PC133 and I've only got DDR. At least I'm saved from trashing the CPU without cause. Once again cheers and I'm gonna have to give this one little thought. c ya Ian
You assume correctly, I was a little suspect of the system file being dropped, but AVG comes back clean on it. I'm gonna try to borrow some PC133 RAM and give it another go, failing that i think it's about time he upgraded anyway.
While AVG is alright (mainly because it's free), you might want to run one or more of the online scans, ie Panda or PCCillin iirc. Another thing to try would be to back up the drive and try a fresh install.
back up important stuff and start from scratch. Its much less stressful that trying to find whats making it crash
Well I've now got hold of a strip of 133 and it all seems to have settled down, it's only a 64mb strip so XP is craaaawwwlliiinnggg. Off to Bowlers computer mart tomorrow to pick up a new 256mb strip. Cheers folks. Ian
You might need to check support for 256m - put one in a P3-733 at work and it only recognised it as 128M, not sure if it was because it was double sided though - so swapped it for 2 * 128's instead.
if the mobo has an intel 440bx chipset it will do fine with the 256 stick as long as its not the newer double density memory, basically make sure it has ram chips on both sides, although that doesn't necessarily gaurantee that it will work though.
