A friend of mine brought me his computer a few months ago for repair, complaining that it was crashing every time he used firefox. I gave it the usual once-over and ran my usual suite of utilities but found nothing suspicious. Then he booted it up and got the dreaded Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM at the dos prompt.
Rather than go through the tedious process of restoring the registry I went decided to backup/reformat/reinstall. Also tedious but more familiar.
A few days later he called me up and reported the same symptoms and then, again, a few days later, the same form of death. Once more I resurrected his machine and sent him on his way.
A couple of weeks later the same sequence repeated itself. I told him that, at this point, it was looking to me like some sort of hardware problem. A mysterious one, too, because I tested his RAM and hard drive, which passed every test I threw at them.
His power supply sounds like a lawnmower. I tested it quickly with one of those pocket PSU testers but all the voltages seemed stable for the few minutes I was monitoring it. Still, maybe it's defective, intermittently spiking or sagging. I suggested he take it back to the guy who built it and get parts replaced on warranty if that was still possible. His guy refused to replace any parts but he tested all the components and found nothing amiss.
So now this wretched box is on my desk again (I'm a good friend. And we barter hour-for-hour of service. And he's a massage therapist. And I have 5 hours of shiatsu coming my way).
Does anyone have any speculations, theories or theories on what might be causing this machine to misbehave?
I sure don't.
Rather than go through the tedious process of restoring the registry I went decided to backup/reformat/reinstall. Also tedious but more familiar.
A few days later he called me up and reported the same symptoms and then, again, a few days later, the same form of death. Once more I resurrected his machine and sent him on his way.
A couple of weeks later the same sequence repeated itself. I told him that, at this point, it was looking to me like some sort of hardware problem. A mysterious one, too, because I tested his RAM and hard drive, which passed every test I threw at them.
His power supply sounds like a lawnmower. I tested it quickly with one of those pocket PSU testers but all the voltages seemed stable for the few minutes I was monitoring it. Still, maybe it's defective, intermittently spiking or sagging. I suggested he take it back to the guy who built it and get parts replaced on warranty if that was still possible. His guy refused to replace any parts but he tested all the components and found nothing amiss.
So now this wretched box is on my desk again (I'm a good friend. And we barter hour-for-hour of service. And he's a massage therapist. And I have 5 hours of shiatsu coming my way).
Does anyone have any speculations, theories or theories on what might be causing this machine to misbehave?
I sure don't.
