well, I have cruised the Dell support forms and don't find these problems so let me ask you kind folks before I post there as I am impressed with the ability of the list to find answers to strange questions.
First, its an older Dell. 500 mhz I think, 256 ram, 40g HD. Micron, if that tells anyone anything. 1) The symptom: black Dos-like screen that says Alert! Regulator Failure! Sounds really ugly, I am sure you will agree. It is accompanied by a total hardware freeze, no mouse, no keyboard, and in fact I have at times had to pull the power cord to get it to reboot. I have narrowed the circumstances where this happens to "editing jpegs at high magnification in Photoshop." Only. Which I find bizarre... the message makes it sound like the machine is overheating, definitely doing something hardware related anyway, I thought RAM possibly, but I have had the machine on for days, doing massive uploads and downloads while playing winamp and surfing the internet, sending email and opening and closing huge text files (400 p Word docs) and nada, I have been known to run out of resouces (often - :P) but never to overheat or to get this message. But let me try to clean up these really badly-scanned drawings, and kablooie. I can of course, refrain from using Photoshop. But this doesnt get my artwork ready. And dang, is there another package out there that does the same stuff? It would have to be free, too, or at least a trial version. I am familiar with Gimp but it's not all that intuitive and crashes, which is a bad things when you are making changes to big text files. 2) On boot, the computer says it can't find any hard drives, press F2 for setup and F1 to continue. If you press F1 the machine boots normally. Gel was having this issue earlier this year, but as I understand it he stopped getting this message when he changed the hard drive cable. I then changed mine also, but no joy. It does not seem, as someone suggested then, to be a failing hard drive. Despite the massive FTPing I run scandisk and defrag often and there are few if any bad sectors. Performance is about what you might expect, ie after 6 or 7 hours of simultaneous internet, large Word docs and FTP, I start getting messages suggesting that i might like save my work and close some windows. Less time if I am listening to internet radio at the same time :) btw, this is w98 se. There are no conflicts in device manager. Lets see, virus scan is clean, and these problems occur regardless of the presense of adware, for which I do also scan regularly. Thanks for any ideas. Dana ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Archives: http://www.houseoffusion.com/lists.cfm?link=t:5 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/lists.cfm?link=s:5 Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.5 Your ad could be here. Monies from ads go to support these lists and provide more resources for the community. http://www.fusionauthority.com/ads.cfm
