A little background: my bosses wife put a new monitor (pnp)on her dad’s computer. It suddenly “quit working”. Enter me.
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He has a custom box, running Wink2k SP4. The monitor is a huge panel, LCD…the works. I turn on the computer with no problems, it took me a few minutes to get it to start malfunctioning (I had time to reinstall a printer, fix his network, run an ipconfig release/renew, and start to check the email). Seemingly out of the blue, the CPU shut down.
I restarted it and it shut down immediately before the login screen.
I wait a few seconds, open it and run BIOS. It reports his CPU temp at 85oC. That scares me, so I check and I don’t feel anything anywhere near that warm. I set all the heating alerts to active, and to alert me at 90oC. I restart the computer, and all the alarms go off. I turn them off in BIOS, and boot up. I’m almost satisfied that he just needs some new heatsink paste.
But, he says this has never happened before. That makes me curious, so I go where we left off at opening his email (via MSN Messenger 7.0)–boom, immediate shutdown.
I reboot, do it again, and again, and again to the same results.
I reboot, exit MSN at first chance, and go to remove the program…it shuts off as soon as I open the “Add or Remove Software” tool.
So, I reboot, navigate down through Program Files and delete the file. Everything seems to be running smoothly. I start to work on getting an alternate method of logging him into his email, we reset his email, and it shuts down.
So, I recheck the Event Viewer, and it’s having problems with mobsync.dll, I unregister it. Problem keeps happening.
I open Task Manager and move to the Performance Tab. I open the “Add or Remove Software” tool. CPU Usage history Spikes, falls, HUGELY spikes, falls, then tops out and it shuts off. Every time it shut off, it did this in Usage History. Even just opening MS Word brought it near the brink.
I checked his memory, I checked indexing allocations, everything. Can’t find a single reason for it to be doing that.
So, any ideas why that could be happening?
Again, it reports a very high operating temp, though I can’t feel it (and at 85oC, I should be smelling it, too).
It shuts off at irregular times, sometimes without any seeming provocation.
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Incidentally, I could produce the same errors with the old monitor installed, and he assured me this happening immediately after the new monitor was installed.
