I rescued a Gateway ATXSTF "Performance 1400" machine from the dumpster
at the town's clean-up day Saturday. The owner said that he thought
"something was wrong with the motherboard". It had a Staples repair
sticker and another sticker on the back announcing that it was
"refurbished" - I suppose those two stickers should have been enough to
let it go into the dumpster. :-)
First, it wouldn't boot at all - just a series of beeps. I took a chance
and replaced the battery (I didn't have a 2032, so I threw in a 2025,
which seems to work OK), and it now boots up, but then would start to
load WinXP and then re-boot repeatedly. So I pulled every plug,
connector, card, memory, and even the P4 processor and re-seated them.
Now it boots up and loads WinXP (home), but if I try to much of
anything, I get a BSD with the usual cryptic messages - never the same
ones twice. Thinking that I might have a bad ram (there are two 512 meg
sticks), I pulled them one at a time, but all that did was slow the
Windows boot time. It came with another hard drive (apparently the
trouble started when the owner tried to install a 200 gig drive to
replace the 100 gig drive), and I will try that next. I really don't
need another 1.5 GHz Windowz machine, but I am just ornery enough that I
would like to get it working.
Any (constructive) suggestions?
Mike
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