Ancient Athlon troubles...

[His Royal Majesty King V]

All,

I'm not quite sure where to begin with this one.

A buddy of mine gave me his old Athlon 500 system, a Compaq Presario 5838.

Compaq's site says it's an Irongate chipset . . but I think it's got the VIA southbridge (judging by that VIA chip on the board). I'm assuming the northbridge chip (under a heatsink) is the AMD 751 or 750 or whatever it was back then.

Anyway, it won't POST, boot, or anything.

I can power it on, and the hard drive spins up. The "Num Lock", "Caps Lock", and "Scroll Lock" lights on the keyboard will very briefly flick on, then back off.

The hard drive LED green, and the power LED comes on amber. I don't know if it's supposed to be green, and that the amber indicates an error, or if it's supposed to be amber. Hard drive LED will eventually shut off after a number of seconds.

The monitor, however, stays blank, with its LED being amber instead of the usual green.

I've tried pulling out everything except the video card and CPU, even disconnected the drives. Tried pulling out all the DIMMs except that which came with the computer. And I've tried swapping video cards.

No change.

I'm guessing it's possible that the CPU is bad, or the motherboard. But I'm not sure if I'm overlooking something.

Can anyone offer suggestions? I really would like to get this thing going! A processor replacement I might well do, particularly since I was considering going with a cheap upgrade for it anyway.

Thanks in advance.

[Jim]

You could try changing the mobo battery, have seen that leave a monitor in sleep mode before. Apart from that only thing I know that sometimes helps in that situation, is clear the bios. Good luck

[His Royal Majesty King V]

Tried the BIOS clear trick shortly after posting my previous message. No good.

I didn't think about the battery though. I might give that a shot, swapping in a known good one, and keeping my fingers crossed that there isn't some kind of short that drains the battery out.

Thanks for the suggestion!

[punkrawker82]

I ran into this same problem with a 550Mhz compaq a few years ago. It just wouldn't boot, and seemed to be in suspend or something. I couldn't figure it out either. The comp was sent back under warranty, and returned to the person fixed. I have no idea how it was fixed...

Compaq's are just evil, especially 500Mhz ones...

[Wiggy]

Try holding down 'Insert' and then switching it on.


Works sometimes on Socket A.

[His Royal Majesty King V]

Holding down insert didn't help.

Checked the battery, it's got 3V output.

It was suggested over at AMDZone that I might have bad capacitors. They said to check for swollen or leaking ones, but I didn't notice any.

Tried removing and then reinstalling the battery. No good.

I did forget to mention that it takes the "hold down switch for 4 seconds" to power the system back off. This makes me slightly lean toward the CPU.

Countered of course by the fact that I've NEVER run into a dead CPU .... well, aside from a PR200 Cyrix processor. But never an AMD or Intel.

This being uncertain crap is driving me bananas. I'd much rather know that "component X is dead..."

[Jim]

Solution lies in having friends or friendly local computer shop. Try different cpu on board. Try cpu on different board. Get answers fast that way.

[His Royal Majesty King V]

Yep . . that's what I want to try.

A'course, I gotta figure out how friendly the local computer shop is!

I'm hoping they'll just plug the CPU into something and say it works or doesn't work without charging me more than it costs to replace the CPU!

Depending on how much that is, it might be cheaper just to buy an old CPU and test with it!

All my friends, however, just laugh, as they're in the 1GHz and beyond zone.

[Wiggy]

Buy one from Ebay for a couple of quid. AMD had excellent yields back then and you can get v.good overclockers.

They were quite involved when it came to overclocking them, what with cache dividers etc.

[His Royal Majesty King V]

That's probably what I'm going to wind up doing actually.

Total digression: What's a "quid"? I remember vaguely pounds, shillings, and pence (though don't remember what the relation between them is), but never knew what a "quid" was.

Also, is "guinea" a monetary unit that was used in England? Or am I thinking France?

[Jim]

Quid is slang for "Pound" Guinea is British but don't ask me what it's value is. Move here to Tarawna. (Toronto) - Very friendly local computer shop. Do that sort of thing no charge. Must find at least one friend with classier taste. The hold down switch four seconds bit, unless I am mistaken, (no experience with ATXs), is just the normal "soft off "shutoff time. On most ATX boards I think that can be set to either "Instant off" or "Soft off".

[His Royal Majesty King V]

Well, relocation's a bit tough.... I guess we just need to invent teleporters.

[Wiggy]

Sorry, I forget people don't know English slang too well.

A Shilling is pre-decimal currency.

12 pennies = 1 shilling
20 shillings = 1 pound

240 pennies = 1 pound

A Guinea is a very old coin worth £1/1/0 i.e 13 shillings. It's still used in language regarding Horse races.

In decimal money. A 'Monkey' is £500 and a 'Pony' is £25. A 'Grand' is £1000, a 'Ton' is a £100 , a 'Score' is £20. 'The Readies' or 'Dosh' is cash in general, and 'Shapnel' is loose change.

And if you want total confusion? Google 'Cockney Rhyming Slang'.

Oh yeah, 'Quid', 'Squid' and 'Nicker' = £1.

[His Royal Majesty King V]

Ahh . . gotcha... parallel with the medieval deiniers/sous/livres

And the proportions because, if I recall right, back in medieval days, silver was worth approximately 12x copper's value, and gold was about 20x silver's value.

If I remember history right, anyway. Thanks for the clarifications!

[His Royal Majesty King V]

Ok, time for a bit of an update.

I'm stumped......

Just got a supposedly new board for it. Admittedly from eBay, but still.....

I've tried on both boards the following:

1) Two different CPUs
2) Two different PSUs (one KNOWN working)
3) Different RAM chips (off an older Slot 1 system, known working)
4) Two different video cards

Both boards give me the exact same symptoms. Basically, I'm out some (thankfully not very much) money, and can only guess that I have one of the following scenarios:
1) Two bad motherboards
2) Two bad CPUs
3) Bad RAM, and the other RAM I tried is incompatible with this particular board.

Bah...... frustrating, to say the least.