Why is my Mini-ATX crashing?

December 24, 2005 10:07 AM

I have a Micro ATX Celeron 900mhz 512MB RAM WInXP Pro. It crashes completely (blank screen, reset required) when ever I open an Office document or try to access any website.

I have swapped the RAM so I'm sure that's not causing it, I have also checked the HD for errors and it's OK. I have done a reformat & reinstall of XP but that didn't fix the problem so I assume it's hardware related.

Any ideas please?

posted by kenchie to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Do any other programs work, or is it just on Office documents?

It would seem to me that if it was a severe hardware problem, nothing would work.

Barring that, do you have another machine you can test components in to isolate the problem, and potentially reproduce it?
posted by TeamBilly at 10:14 AM on December 24, 2005

Response by poster: I don't have another machine to swap parts out of - I got lucky with a spare stick of RAM but it didn't solve the problem!
posted by kenchie at 10:26 AM on December 24, 2005

One thought is to borrow another stick of RAM from a friend, or go buy one - you can return it if it turns out to be un-needed.

I used to run into something similar to this back when I was hardware tech. You can't assume that the second piece of RAM you swapped out is good. I used to get bad motherboards from IBM on occasion...take the thinkpad apart, replace mobo, re-assemble only to find the part was bad. etc.

It sounds like a memory problem to me, given that large, memory intensive apps are killing it. And, for what it's worth, I have seen RAM work fine in one machine, but fail in another. Computers are fun...
posted by Richat at 10:49 AM on December 24, 2005

You could try using only one of the sticks at a time. XP will run on 256MB, just slow. Check the power settings, too, make sure noone set it to hibernate in two minutes.
posted by FredsinPa at 10:59 AM on December 24, 2005

There is at least one shared symptom here, which is Internet access. Microsoft Office can be fairly aggressive about trying to access the Internet unless it's properly corralled.

If the crash doesn't occur when you, for example, start up WordPad, an Internet-access circumstance could be at fault. Any largish application you have on the machine which doesn't ever access the Internet would be a better test than smallish WordPad, since it would reduce the possibility of large programs using lots of machine resources being the actual problem.

Are you accessing the Internet through IE on the machine? If so, and if the WordPad/larger application runs successfully, you might try test solution 101: install Firefox and see if works. If that fails, you may be looking at a critical failure in the Internet software or hardware connect.

If non-Internet related applications fail, the possibility of a serious hardware problem increases, but still isn't definitive. If you've the patience, you can narrow down the problem candidates. There are a lot more things to try as more information becomes available, should you want to continue the long-distance multiuser-based feedback debugging route.
posted by mdevore at 12:00 PM on December 24, 2005

Just to completely rule out bad RAM, run memtest.

I'm assuming that you've had this computer for a while and it's only now developing problems. It's *possible* that your RAM isn't actually rotten but that the BIOS settings (CAS latency, timing, speed) for handling RAM have been changed, somehow.

Since you've cracked the case to replace the RAM, I'm assuming that the fans all work, not too many dust bunnies, &c thus ruling out over-heating.

One thing that you might try (if you have a computer that has functional 'net access) might be to download and burn an ubuntu live CD (it comes with open office and firefox) and see if you still have problems opening word documents and accessing the network.
posted by PurplePorpoise at 12:40 PM on December 24, 2005