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BTW Scorpion, here's what I found on the HP motherboard with the bad capacitors:
(all those black cylinders with the "HM(M)" letters should have nice, flat tops instead of bulging up like these, and there should be nothing coming out of the top of them, either!)
 

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BTW Scorpion, here's what I found on the HP motherboard with the bad capacitors:
(all those black cylinders with the "HM(M)" letters should have nice, flat tops instead of bulging up like these, and there should be nothing coming out of the topof them, either!)

Hi Foxbat, I have checked the motherboard and there is no sign of bad capacitors. I have found out that when I took the IDE cable off the CD drive, I then had power to that drive. weird. The computer is my Dell 4600. It is 3 years old. Do you think it is still the PSU?

Thanks
Scorp
 
Hi Foxbat, I have checked the motherboard and there is no sign of bad capacitors.
That's good! Even though the parts to fix the HP D325 came to $3.00, by the time you add shipping and a minimum $5 handling charge, it turns into a lot more expensive repair. Plus, you have to like doing that sort of thing, because motherboards are cheap enough that you could just as easily go that route.
I have found out that when I took the IDE cable off the CD drive, I then had power to that drive. weird. The computer is my Dell 4600. It is 3 years old. Do you think it is still the PSU?

Thanks
Scorp
Gee, Scorp, now that you say that, I might lean towards a bad CD-ROM drive instead of the Power Supply. Will your system boot up if you leave the IDE cable off of the CD-ROM drive?
 
That's good! Even though the parts to fix the HP D325 came to $3.00, by the time you add shipping and a minimum $5 handling charge, it turns into a lot more expensive repair. Plus, you have to like doing that sort of thing, because motherboards are cheap enough that you could just as easily go that route.Gee, Scorp, now that you say that, I might lean towards a bad CD-ROM drive instead of the Power Supply. Will your system boot up if you leave the IDE cable off of the CD-ROM drive?

Hi Foxbat, My 3 drives (2 CD and 1 Floppy) get power to them as long as I unplug the IDE cable. Thats what is weird about it. My drives do work. I have tried to just have the HD plugged in and boot but no luck. Both my system fans still work when I turn the computer on.

Thanks
Scorp
 
Im still trying to figure out what was going on but when I had it installed it did slow down my comp to some degrea and when I tried playing a video recently the media players all would lag up so bad that the interface would refresh at a visible line by line rate. At the moment some things are playing better but I still cant play any mpeg movies and Im having a problem with some games going to desktop but not shutting down so Im thinking that something else may have changed. Coincidently my wireless network icon is constantly saying its aquiring network address but Im online and the client for the wireless card says Im online obviously.
 
Scorp,
Do you happen to have a spare IDE cable? I suppose it is possible that you have a bad IDE cable, but usually they don't fail unless they're under mechanical stress.

It sounds like you've tried reseating the cables to the motherboard. Can you boot with just the CD-ROM plugged in, but no HD? I'd leave the floppy off, too. Are there any beeps with everything hooked up or any error LEDs?

My son has a Dimension 4600 from 2½ years ago, but it has a single SATA drive for the system disk in addition to the IDE for the DVD-ROM. It occasionally acts weird and all the fans blow at maximum speed, but there's no computer activity. You have to hold in the power button for 15-20 seconds to shut it off. It's fine after that. Another quality Dell PC!
 
Scorp,
Do you happen to have a spare IDE cable? I suppose it is possible that you have a bad IDE cable, but usually they don't fail unless they're under mechanical stress.

It sounds like you've tried reseating the cables to the motherboard. Can you boot with just the CD-ROM plugged in, but no HD? I'd leave the floppy off, too. Are there any beeps with everything hooked up or any error LEDs?

My son has a Dimension 4600 from 2½ years ago, but it has a single SATA drive for the system disk in addition to the IDE for the DVD-ROM. It occasionally acts weird and all the fans blow at maximum speed, but there's no computer activity. You have to hold in the power button for 15-20 seconds to shut it off. It's fine after that. Another quality Dell PC!

Hi Foxbat, I cannot boot from CD drive because if I plug in the IDE cable, the drive goes dead. Yeah I tried a different IDE cable with no luck. My HD is not SATA. I have no beeps and no video.

Thanks

Scorp
 
Scorp,
Wow, so no CD, no HD, you've tried another IDE cable... Something is not happy with your system, that's for sure. One idea: do you have an external IDE USB2 enclosure? You might be able to plug your Dell's hard drive into that and set your BIOS to boot from the USB. If that works, I think you're back to the original theory that your P/S is bad.
 
I wonder if SamPatterson is on holiday? His points production have plummeted down to zero.

I was worried about leaving the house with my computers Folding, especially since the SMP beta on the Mac needs to be watched closely to make sure it doesn't hang at the completion of a WU or after sending results. I figured I'd shut the Mac down and give it a couple of days off. The Windows client version seems to run on its own okay, no handholding.

SatinKzo is getting close to passing me on Stanford's page to take the #1 spot for our Team! So, before I lose the #1, I needed a snapshot of my Folding Widget so I can remember my glory days... ;)
 

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Hah! No sooner than I had posted that message, I look at Stanford, and what do I see?
Folding@Home Page said:
Team members
Rank
(within team)...User..............Score.....WU
.......1........SatinKzo.........169789.....610
.......2........Foxbat...........169059.....148

Congratulations, SatinKzo!!! Now the pressure is off me; there's a new Top Dawg in town!:up
 
Hah! No sooner than I had posted that message, I look at Stanford, and what do I see?

Congratulations, SatinKzo!!! Now the pressure is off me; there's a new Top Dawg in town!:up

WOOOHOOOO! I'm really beside myself at this moment. I'm kind of speechless. :) I'd like to thank friends and family who donated machines to the cause, the mindless drone machines at work whom I assimilated into my collective.
I might be #1 on the stats now foxbat, but you'll always be #1 in our hearts! :bow
The pts make it fun to see how we rank, but it really is nice to know that someday this work may help someone.


Back on Sam, I was curious what happened to him and the sudden pts drop off.
 
BTW, I just looked, and I'm back in front by 480 points. :)

I don't know how long that will last, though, the way your Folding Army cranks out WUs... :D
 
Back on Sam, I was curious what happened to him and the sudden pts drop off.

A couple of my machines stopped uploading results (in queue to be sent) and something from the last security updates from MS seems to have messed up the clients. I had to start running them in non-administrator mode to have them work. Weird stuff. Hopefully all are back working now.
 
Man, I wish I could get more of those WUs... I got a Work Unit from Project 2605 (Run 13, Clone 100, Gen 6) that finished up in 18 hours vs. the 32 hours that my Mac normally takes to finish a WU. And the best part? It was worth 1760 points! The stats page for the completion said the Mac Pro was crunching at over 4.4 GFLOPs!
 
Sam, good to have you back on board!

Ah, the Folding gods giveth, and they takest away... I found that Crucial had Mac Pro memory, so I added an extra GB (waiting for the 1GB & 2 GB modules to come down more) and upgraded my Mac Pro this a.m. Well, the SMP client got really confused when I restarted it and reported that I had 4,294,965,248 MB available! (I wish!)

Needless to say, when the client started up, it must have tried to allocate all that memory because the Mac went BANG! with a Kernel Panic. Unfortunately, it also wiped out 70+% of the current WU by causing a Bad Checksum in one of the Work files.

So, SatinKzo, I think you're on top now, no questions asked. Of course, the aggregate score still has me a week or so away from losing first, but I may have a trick or two up my sleeve...;)
 
Still have weird things happening with the SMP client machines. One finally was able to upload today but not all the queued units just the one it had finished. Strange. It is also strange it all happened at once. I think I had one day with 0 results sent. The only changes to my machines were to install the security updates from MS. Hopefully everything will get caught up and can start adding to the point total again.
 
I replaced the blown caps on that HP D325 (see the photo from a few posts back) tonight and I'm using it right now with the KNOPIX CD to post this message. Two days ago, this box wouldn't stay up for more than four minutes before it would freeze (usually it wouldn't even get through the BIOS splash screen.) I figured I'd set it up to Fold as a good burn-in test :), but instead of Windows XP, I thought I'd try the Folding Linux distribution that was talked about earlier.

This PC is a 2.3 GHz Athlon XP with 512 MB of DDR 333 RAM, but I don't know how that matches up with the Pentium family, like single core vs. multicore or how much cache it has. It also has an AGP slot (video is on-board right now) so no new ATi X1950 PCI-Express card in the future. I'm thinking that for the $5 for the parts and $??? for my time, it's not a bad box.
 
looks like this WU is gonna take a while:
[06:57:17] Writing local files
[06:57:17] Completed 70000 out of 1000000 steps (7 percent)
[13:24:34] Writing local files
[13:24:34] Completed 80000 out of 1000000 steps (8 percent)
 
Protein: p1487_DPPC_DOPC_CHOL
hw.model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 5120 @ 1.86GHz

I've had much faster WU's.
This one just caught my eye.

LER