On Friday 21 May 2010 22:59:23 Scoobydo wrote:
> If you've had experience of several bad CPU's then you must be a
> system builder with hundreds of builds under your belt. I'm just a
> hobbyist and have only built 20 or so boxes over the years and I've
> never even heard of anyone having a CPU go bad until you said it. Bad
> mobo's, PSU's, hardrives, floppies, optical drives, video cards, RAM,
> fans etc. I've seen it all with the single exception of the
> processor. CPU's are by far the most reliable component of any PC,
> period. Intel and AMD deserve great respect for that major
> accomplishment. Of course static electricity can kill one pretty
> easily but that's not "going bad", that's user error. Somewhere in
> this area in a land fill is my original IBM PS/2 486 SX-25 and I'd
> bet anything that if it were buried functional with no bent or broken
> pins it would still run if socketed in a working box. I really
> believe that..
With 40+ years as a hardware engineer you see all kinds of strange
things.
The first bad cpu I ever saw was dropped on the floor and the chappie
that dropped it straightened the pins and put in into service (circa
8088/86 Linotype character and font generator 8" floppy drives, two of
them). The characters produced had weird distortions. It took days to
find that one and two minutes to fix it. The original technician
admitted what he had done when it was proved to be the cpu.
> > The other suggestion I would make is to check the BIOS beep codes
> > to see what the beep code means.
I note that no one has commented on using the beep codes as a pointer to
a possible MB/CPU fault.
--
Best Regards:
Derrick.
Running Open SuSE 11.1 KDE 3.5.10 Desktop.
Pontefract Linux Users Group.
plug @ play-net.co.uk
