cook@sybil.cs.Buffalo.EDU (John M. Cook) (12/29/89)
I've never been formally taught about PC repair, just how develop
systems. I was lead to believe that a board with no moving parts
could last a lifetime. The part that normally breakdown are drives.
Well we purchased a computer mail-order (one of many), but this one
seems to be a real lemon. It's been returned under warranty 5th time
in the past year. First it was having Hard Drive problems now it
appears to be blowing motherboards. This 286 happens to be a
fileserver for our Novell network. It seems whenever traffic starts
getting high the machine starts breaking down. High traffic is
defined as more than two users logged on at the same time. It's a
small office.
The problem first happen a month ago, the girl that is in charge
of Booting the fileserver says that the machine was on running fine
then it's keyboard locked-up and the screen went blank. When she
tryed to reboot, before the ROM screen appeared and right after the
Hard Drive did a seek routine, she heard three beeps then the machine
just locked-up. The tech crew at the place we bought it were confused
by the problem, but the final outcome was that the motherboard was
replaced. On the new motherboard the speaker didn't work properly but
we were to far behind in work to return the machine again. But
yesterday we had three people logged onto the network and guess what
happened, the fileserver died. Since the speaker wasn't working I
couldn't tell if the 5 beeps were happening but the ROM routine ended
in the same spot.
Aside from ordering another machine from a different mailorder
house to replace this fileserver so not everyone goes down when the
lemon does, we are still trying to figure out WHY this is happening.
This office has had more hardware problems in the past year than
anyone I know. The 5yr old XT is understandable but the AT is now a
year old except almost every part has been replaced at least once.
We are moving to a new building this summer and having the electrical
system designed for computer equipment.
Our back-up routine dosn't assume a motherboard will burn-out but as
soon as I can get machine that will stay running long enough to
restore all the back-ups I'll have to design a routine where
everything can be moved to another machine.
What a Christmas present, so if any of you Net people have some
hardware experience please tell me if this has been a wild or normal
type problem. The mail-order techs have my machine currently and we
won't know anything till Monday. Just that they are honoring the
warranty.
John Cook