My mother in law gave me her computer to fix the other day,

The operating system was a complete mess (still on sp1,rarely updated or connected to the net,never defragged) and the computer would only boot into a black screen, nothing shown just black. The motherboard had 2 years worth of dust on it to the point the cpu cooler was solid brown (im not kidding). So I told her I would try and fix it.
First i cleaned out the case with compressed air and noticed the AGP slot had been broken off, when questioned, my mother in law denied any knowledge of the hoonage (she does have a daughter and a son living with her and a hubby who likes to tinker)

After cleaning the case, I removed the cpu cooler and gave it a thourou cleaning then reapplied the thermal grease and reinstalled the assembly.

I installed my old ATI radeon 9200se into an empty PCI slot

Added my extra Antec 300watt power supply I had kicking around to replace the crappy 200 watt OEM one waiting to die and take the motherboard with it.

Reinstalled windows, I deleted the 5gig backup partition told it to use NTFS as it was fat32 and let er rip (maybe its trying to run fat32 and NTFS on the same HD)??.

The computer booted up for the first time with a message to choose which operating sytem to run, xp PRO(my install) or xp media(old os) XP pro booted to desktop fine, choosing option 2 results in a could not load message, missing whatever.

So I updated the the various drivers and xp security updates installed some games and utilities, backup family photos and just surfed the net and used it for about 6hours with out any problems, during this time a registry scan was performed several times and several runs of the defragger was done, I also hunted down the old user profiles and info from documents and setting (hidden folders shown) anything that was part of the old OS, I never TOUCHED the windows folder though.

So she calls the other day complaining of random reboots saying the computer will run for a short time and then just reboot in the middle of something, Im alittle puzzled, I ran this computer for several hours without any shutdowns, she lives 50 miles away and will be bringing it back to me to look at again.

What Im thinking is
-Windows install is bad, the installer did not convert the enter drive to NTFS?? (is this possible?, I deleted the extra partition so its just one 40 gig drive)
-Hard drive is damaged, it had 8gigs out of 40gigs left on it when she gave the computer and it showed a bright red solid block after reinstall in the defragmenter, the drive makes no abnormal noises though (space is opposite now with only 8gigs used but a small red block shows that will not defrag seperate from the main blue bar)
-Mixing the old pc2100 ram with the not so old pc2700, donno if this would be a problem.
-The cpu fan seemed too QUIET like its RPM was very low, perhaps its finally died and the computers going into thermal protection.
-Processor has partial thermal damage from running hot for too long (that heatsink was terribly clogged)
I would really appreciate some opinions on this

Here is the original sytem specs-
Compaq Presario S6000NX (DQ178A#ABA) PC Desktop
40 gig HD
2.7Ghz Intel celeron
256meg pc2100 ram (I added some 256 pc2700 that I had lying around)
Cheap OEM msi ms-6577 v3.1 motherboard with the agp slot snapped off (dont know how they managed that) google searches tell me it will accept pc2100 and pc2700.

Edit- they didnt break off the agp slot after all, I found the original speck sheet and photos, it just looks like its been broken off.
update the BIOS manThe first thing I think I'd do is start it up and observe it's behavior.  Does it randomly restart, as she says it does?  If the computer actually runs fine, as it was when you returned it to her, I'd suspect they may have an unreliable power source.  A UPS might be the solution for that.  

When you worked on the computer, did you have a firewall enabled and have anti-virus software and some spyware removal tools installed before you returned it to her?  Does she understand the significance of all that, and how to use the software?

I think you should investigate the overheating possibility.  Perhaps you need to re-do the CPU heatsink installation.  And, of course, verify that the fans are all working.  

Is the computer still showing two OS when it starts up?  In other words, it's really a dual-boot configuration but the old Win XP Media Center installation does not run right?  Is that right?  If so, SEEMS like you ought to at least edit the BOOT.INI file so that she no longer sees the old OS during startup.  


As soon as I get my hands on it I will update the bios, the HP website that has the updates is horrible to navigate and I only last night found the updates page for this particular model.

I installed Spybot search and destroy and Avira personal antivirus, no firewall (just windows fire wall) as this computer is not connected to the net (they live in a very rural area and cant get more than 14kps total bandwidth so they don't bother).

I'll get them to check the CPU fan as soon as possible.

Please tell me how to edit the boot INI file because I really want to fix that dual boot bug (I didn't know how to fix it until you mentioned I could edit the boot.INI file)).
EDIT- Googled on how to edit the boot ini file, seems pretty straightforward
Have you ever done a BIOS update?  I suggest you review what HP says any BIOS updates are supposed to fix and, if that does not apply to this computer, then don't update the BIOS.  Some risk is associated with that procedure.  If the update fails to work for some reason, the computer could be rendered inoperable.

Let us know how things went once you've had a chance to work on that computer some more.If you did not format the drive before the Windows install, I would suggest deleting all partitions, creating one large one and choose to format duiring the install.

First test the hard drive with free diagnostics from the appropriate drive maker's site.

Take out the extra RAM. Test the original with the free download at www.memtest86.com

Run the machine and see if any problems.

If so, take off the side panel and blow a fan directly in there while working and see if that helps.

Post back your findings.

The suggest to update the BIOS is usually from someone who does not know what else to do.  

Many a machine has been turned into a doorstop by an improper BIOS flash. There may not even be one available.Noted.
Will post results as soon as she brings me the computer (may take a week).OK, well I got the computer today and the plot, she has thickend.
Im drinking many beers now as my stress levels are at maximum, god bless the drink.

Hook everything up and press power and viola! nothing, the screen doesnt so much as flicker, complety dark (same with my montitor, tried it as well)

Took out the harddrive and hooked it up as a slave on my computer, ran speedfan to check its S.M.A.R.T data and the results said it was in perfect health.

Went into disk management and found it still had a 5gig partition (the old backup partition), I reformatted it into NTFS.

Ran a virus scan on the drive, it found 5 trojan downloaders and deleted them, they seemed to be in windows update dll's (note- I never opened anything on the drive when it was installed on my computer, to avoid getting any "cooties" from it.)

Reinstalled hard drive and started to get anything to show onscreen, put in original Compaq windows install disk with no diff, put in my motherboard driver disk (just to see if it woiuld give a boot screen at all) no luck.

The computer doesnt seem to read anything from the harddrive, when powered up all the fans spin up normaly (even the CPU fan, checked it to make sure it was ok) but the hard drive activity light shows for a split second and goes dark.

Just picked up some floppy disks, im going to try making a boot floppy to see if I can just get into bios at least.
thats all for the moment.


Edit- so far no luck getting anything even with a boot floppy.

The mobo or processor is dead, I cant think of anything else that would do this the power supply works, hard drive works, cd/drive is spinning, floppy drive is making noisel, connections are firm and secure.
This is the readme file from the boot floppy I tried(copy/paste)-

www.bootdisk.com

A windows XP quickboot diskette is used to boot into your otherwise
healthy XP when your startup files are bad, missing, corrupted, or
the MBR is damaged.

While the boot.ini file is technically specific to each machine
depending on what partition you have Windows installed on and if
you have a multiple boot setup, the majority of pcs have windows
on C: in the default folder and are using an IDE hard drive.

Unlike other bootdisks, the quickboot diskette doesn't care where
the 3 main boot files are located, so simply unpacking them to a
disk that has been formatted on an XP pc should result in a workable
disk for the majority of PCs.

The files included are:
boot.ini
ntdetect.com
ntldr

To create this disk, simply copy these files to an disk that was
formatted on an XP PC. Keep in mind that you can also format a disk in
XP and then use it on another PC like a win9X pc to make this disk.

One can simply unzip this pack to A:

Of course, it may work on an XP PC using any old disk, depending....

Perhaps you just need a basic boot.ini to copy to the root folder.

To use this disk set the pc to boot from the A: drive first by going
into the bios and setting the boot order.


Kindest regards,
Ed Jablonowski



Okay, time for update on the goings on
It was the motherboard, she was dead
Raplaced with asus p4v8x-mx

the old case didnt have the proper connector on the front power button so I bought a new case too(nice one too).
Shes up and running (OH JOY!! ), Im posting from it right now. OHHH YEESS I WIN YOU BUGGERY COMPUTER.
Cost me about 200 bucks in hardware unfortunately (case +accessories/motherboard) and about 30 hours of chainsmoking stress, but the computers almost new and my mother in law couldnt be more pleased.

On the rough side, my own computer gave me some problems, started getting really buggy and then stopped booting alltogether, the brandnew video card (gigabyte 7600gs) had died for no reason (default clock speeds).
Im really iffy about recommending Gigabytes products to anyone, as this is not the first time I have had problems with their hardware, I dont even want warranty on it I just want my money back so I can buy a 7600 from a better manufacturer.
Quote

Okay, time for update on the goings on
It was the motherboard, she was dead (slow death)
Raplaced with asus p4v8x-mx

the old case didnt have the proper connector on the front power button so I bought a new case too(nice one too).
Shes up and running (OH JOY!! ), Im posting from it right now. OHHH YEESS I WIN YOU BUGGERY COMPUTER.
Cost me about 200 bucks in hardware unfortunately (case +accessories/motherboard) and about 30 hours of chainsmoking stress, but the computers almost new and my mother in law couldnt be more pleased.

On the rough side, my own computer gave me some problems, started getting really buggy and then stopped booting alltogether, the brandnew video card (gigabyte 7600gs) had died for no reason (default clock speeds).
Im really iffy about recommending Gigabytes products to anyone, as this is not the first time I have had problems with their hardware, I dont even want warranty on it I just want my money back so I can buy a 7600 from a better manufacturer.