Date: Sun, 5 Jan 1997 22:12:55 -0500 (EST) From: Mike Jeays <jeays@statcan.ca> To: hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Defective motherboard? Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.3.92.970105220941.987A-100000@austral>
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I have recently upgraded my machine to a Pentium 120, with a motherboard by Gigabyte, and 16 Mb of memory. I am experiencing occasional (once or twice a day) crashes, in which either the machine freezes, or it spontaneously reboots. This happened with release 2.1.5, and also with the 2.2-BETA. It seems to happen when memory usage is high, but I can never duplicate it. I have tried disabling the ROM BIOS cache, and have played the combinations on other BIOS settings. I have no doubt it is a hardware problem; my 486-33 ran 2.1.0 for weeks, and never crashed. My problem is to convince the vendor that I have a real problem - he knows nothing of UNIX. (The machine wil run Win95, but I have also seen occasional errors there, such as Explorer trying to execute an invalid instruction or causing a page fault.) Questions - my swap partition is only 16MB, the same size as real memory. Would this hurt stability as well as impair performance? (It is a big slice out of my 212 MB BSD disk, and I don't want to buy a new disk until the hardware is stable.) Is it likely to be memory or the motherboard? I presume the CPU is not the problem. If the motherboard, am I likely to have a defective specimen, or should I get it replaced by an ASUS or other more expensive board? Is there any free software that will help diagnose hardware problems of this kind? Any other advice, such as strategy in dealing with the vendor, please?
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