Free Old PC randomly resets itself - Help!

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Free Old PC randomly resets itself - Help!

By teal_dx
- Mon Dec 14, 2009 12:37 am #161740 I got a free old PC from work that I'm going to use in my garage. The PC has windows 98 and used to work fine when we used it at work.
Well I set it up at home about a year ago and started seeing what was on the 12 gig hard drive (5 gigs of porn! LOL The guy who used to use this one got fired a while back) and after the PC is on for 10 or 15 minutes, the screen goes black for a second and it resets like someone pushed the reset button.
Then when it boots back up it goes through the whole disk scan thing and everything else is working just fine.
I thought it may be the crappy surge protector but I got another and it was still happening. The inside of the PC was kinda dusty so i cleaned it out and it is still happening. All the fans work.
It is completely random when it happens, it can be while browsing files or using a program.
The only time it has not happened is when I get the "Windows is shutting down" screen when I'm going to shut the pc off, but that's another problem because that screen does not go away, it has been up for the past hour. :?

I don't know much about it but it is Pentium III, 256 MB ram.
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By chrono404
- Mon Dec 14, 2009 2:58 am #161764 Look on the motherboard inside and see if any of the capacitor caps are budging, If they are then your mother board is bad. It could also be a Ram Issue, Part of the ram could be bad thus causing your computer to restart.

I would downloading and running memtest86 on it, that will check the ram and make sure thats not an issue.

there is a possibility it could be a software issue.

I would recommend running a virus scan on it such as AVG and reg cleaner such as CCleaner

When you do get it up and going check out vetusware.com. It has tons of "abandonware" basically old software the owners have abandoned, That will help get some software for your old Windows 98 Machine.

Good luck.
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By Apexracing
- Mon Dec 14, 2009 6:38 pm #161842 yea get some anti virus on that right away, also look into re installing windows on it, 98 got corrupt very quickly.
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By LaMbErT*
- Mon Dec 14, 2009 7:30 pm #161851 whats the chances of it running a simple xp setup as apposed to the ugly 98 lol
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By 3kkl3sia
- Mon Dec 14, 2009 8:19 pm #161862 quite honestly, take the time and reinstall linux by itself. Linux is a great OS, there is slowly getting as much support by company's, and there is only like 20-30 virus's (windows has like 300,000 or something). i've been using Ubuntu Linux for almost 3 years and love every second of it, you control the computer, microsoft doesn't!
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By teal_dx
- Tue Dec 15, 2009 2:05 am #161893 I have no clue how to run linux. It has some version called Red Hat on it right now. This pc is going to be in my garage, so I'm only going to be using it for internet and mp3's.
I'd love to put a newer xp on, but not sure how a pentium III 800 mhz will do with xp. Plus I already have some old Win 98 discs somewhere...

Wait till you see this PC and you'll get why I want it in my garage... I gave it a custom paint job a long time ago (when it was still at work) 8)
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By chrono404
- Tue Dec 15, 2009 2:19 am #161896 A real easy of linux to look into is ubuntu. Newer versions even have wine enabled by default letting you use Windows applications inside of linux, has a super easy interface, with you coming from a mac background it will be a super easy jump to ubuntu. :thumb:
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By 3kkl3sia
- Tue Dec 15, 2009 3:04 am #161903 exactly, ubuntu is one of the most friendly linux's around.
i can almost guarentee that if you get it, everything will work.
it requires almost nothing to run flawless and like chrono said
there's a program called WINE that runs windows programs inside linux. there are some more but wine is most popular, and linux is free :thumb:
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By sneepereg
- Tue Dec 15, 2009 4:15 am #161928 ubuntu ftw
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By pacmanlives
- Thu Dec 17, 2009 3:37 am #162412 I think have extra stick's of ram for that bad boy.... I know we have some 128mb sticks here at work for that computer let me know if you have some open slots. While I am not a Ubuntu fan boy at all it is rather easy to use. It is going to be cramped on just 256mb of ram but if you are able to bump it up to anything more you will be better off. If you run into any issue let me know I can try to help you out
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By pacmanlives
- Thu Dec 17, 2009 3:39 am #162413 Xp is going to be balls slow on that box so I dont know if I would go that route. you are at about the min req. to run it. If you do want to put windows on it win2k should do the trick.
Last edited by pacmanlives on Thu Dec 17, 2009 5:43 am, edited 1 time in total.
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By Apexracing
- Thu Dec 17, 2009 4:26 am #162422 i agree on windows 2000, get professional though it is a very stable operating system just not as pretty as xp.
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By teal_dx
- Thu Dec 17, 2009 2:43 pm #162518 it has 3 slots, all full. So it must have a 128 stick and 2 64 sticks. If you have some 128's I'd be glad to buy them off ya :thumb:

BTW I've been messing with this pc and I started by taking out the 12g drive w/ win 98 and the 20 gig w/ linux and putting in an old 60g drive I had. I formatted the drive and left the machine running over night and it never reset itself. So I'm sure it was a software issue. I tried installing windows 98 on it again but it was not recognizing the cd drive for some reason, although it could boot from cd fine. I'll probably mess with it some more over xmas break. I have an old xp pro disc that somebody burned at work, and a few win 98/98 SE discs that are burned, one original win 98 disc, and an original win 95 disc.
I don't know how I ended up with all these :lol:
I'm going to research Ubuntu and learn more about it, I really want to avoid windows at all costs, even though I know nothing about linux.
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