OT: system shuts off sporadically

[Richard Wilson]

Vaughn and All,

Some weeks ago I wrote in asking for help on a similar issue where my
older system would lock up and seeing your note reminded me that I never
passed on the outcome.

The culprit in my case turned out to be a working DE500 PCI NIC that was
incompatible with my system.  Never mind that it had been in the system
idle for several months.  When I finally tried to use it, the system
flaked out and would unexpectedly lock up completely.  The NIC itself
would work and it stayed up for 8 hours once...

Removing the NIC from the system entirely has restored sane and stable
operations.  Go figure.  I never found any log entry or any other
indicator that the NIC was responsible, but experience has shown that it
was.

Richard Wilson
-----------------------------------
On Mon, 2006-01-16 at 16:05 -0600, tigerflag wrote:
> On Monday 16 January 2006 03:22 pm, Vaughn Treude kindly wrote:
> > Thanks for the ideas, Craig, Miles, Austin, and Cat.  I think the CPU
> > fan is OK, and the CPU temperature was good at least when I first
> > powered it up.  Unless the fan is randomly stalling out, I doubt it's
> > heat related, since the timing is so sporadic.  (Then again, the fact
> > that it sometimes won't come up for a couple of minutes does make it
> > seem heat-related.)  So far it's been up and running for 2 hrs now.  The
> > next time it shuts itself off I'll open it again and look at the caps.
> > I didn't notice any capacitor gook when I had it open earlier but I
> > wasn't looking for that either.  :-)  If all else fails, I'll send it
> > back for warranty service.
> 
> 
> This has me curious. These things can drive you crazy, I know. At some time or 
> another I've experienced almost everything all you geniuses suggested. Let us 
> know what it turns out to be.
> 
> Siri Amrit
-- 
Richard Wilson
r dot wilson (nine) at cox dot net