Andy,
Those beeps probably indicated some kind of hardware problem. Judging from what you wrote , probably a badly seated simm. The other thing sound like you found the heat sensor , which basically give lower resistance when temperature gets higher , causing the fan to run faster. Shorting it out would cause the fan to run at full speed. If your CPU gets too hot , you should try to put that sensor somewhere in the airflow coming from the CPU. Mind you , alpha's do get quite hot. (running it at max rpm won't hurt either) And yes , IIRC , a XL won't run without the case fan plugged in ;-) Good luck installing potato ! Jaap hi everyone. I got an old Alpha XL 266, and was going to install debian on it. Whenever I flipped the switch, it would beep at me a couple of times and not go anywhere. The keyboard LEDs would flash, the hard drive would spin up, the floppy would access, but nothing on screen. Last night, I took the entire thing apart, cleaned up the inside (it was pretty dusty), and put it all back together again, and it works fine now. What was the beep for? Was some electrical thing being shorted somewhere? What did I miss? (The other thing is, inside the case there is a power wire going to the case fan, and another pair of wires in the same area that are white. When I short the two white wires together, the power supply fan and the case fan both jump to much greater RPMs. Should I run it like this, or without the high speed? The CPU/riser board gets pretty hot to the touch without it. Also, before I opened the case, the wires had some weird taped contraption that looked like they were beig shorted out, but I couldn't tell--I cut it off.) And is it cool that if the case fan isn't plugged into the power supply, when you flip the switch the power supply will kick up to +5V, then die down and the fan will stop? If the fan's plugged in it works perfectly. Anyway, I'm planning on installing potato now, wish me luck. ;-) Andy MacNamara -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]

