chend@ucs.orst.edu (Donald Chen - Microbiology) (08/29/90)
need help. my computer is down and i don't know why. here are the
particulars. i'll log on again when i can.
yesterday, the computer was on, not connected to any network
it had been working for 2-3 hours, but i left it to run some
experiments. when i started to work on the computer again, there
was no response from the screen to keyboard commands.
i shut it down, and tried to restart. the following occured
every time i tried to boot from the hard drive or from a floppy.
i can go get the machine to start, but after a few (no more than
10 keyboard commands - not related to any piece of software) the
screen freezes and/or the keyboard does not send any commands.
i have the following connected to the dell 310 (386-20MHz):
one harddisk/floppy controller, one vga video card, one bus for
mouse. i don't know who made the controller - it came with the machine;
the video card is originally from paradise, but came with the machine;
the bus mouse is from microsoft.
the only new software to come into my machine is the new norton (5.0)
update, as well as the windows 3.0 update. no one else uses my machine.
i have tried the following to diagnose problem:
1, took mouse card out: but no difference
2, replaced video card with another, but no difference
3, renamed my autoexec.bat and config.sys files so that when
i do boot up, it comes up plain vanilla.
4, dell has a software system analyzer that seems to indicate that the
keyboard and video portions are ok
5, a friend of mine is loaning me a disk controller to see if that makes
a difference; note that today the hard disk is not being initialized and that i can't even get the dos prompt
6, speaking of number 5, i tried to reseat all three boards in case that was
the problem
7, checked the battery for low voltage: it is 4.5V alkaline, computer
guy checked it and it read 4.1V
help
don
s