dell power supply

[kato2274]

just got a L100R that someone wants me to look at due to spotaneous reboots. obviously I'm targeting power supply, but before I do anything, does anyone know off hand if this model has the notorious dell propriatary power supply?

[Delbruc]

I don't know if that model has it off of the top of my head, but the best advice I can give you is to compare the pin-out on the ATX plug that that of a known-standard one. The differences were pretty obvious to me when I compared the two...

Good luck!

Del

[Ya_know]

Originally posted by kato2274
just got a L100R that someone wants me to look at due to spotaneous reboots. obviously I'm targeting power supply, but before I do anything, does anyone know off hand if this model has the notorious dell propriatary power supply?

I don't know anything about the PS, just wanted to remind you to not rule out software/drivers causing the reboots. If it is NT/2k/XP, you will want to turn OFF the Startup and recovery option to automatically reboot following a system failure. This will display the blue screen instead of rebooting, if indeed this is what is happening...

[kato2274]

I think it's windows ME.

though I'm certainly not going to rule out software issues, I tend to focus on hardware first, since that's a little easier to sort out. think the power supply is bad? pull it and replace? 5 minutes and you have an idea whether that hypothesis was bogus. think windows is somehow screwing things up? okay prepare for hours of googling and tweaking before biting the bullet and spending another 1 - 1.5 hours reinstalling the OS. I'm not affraid to go that route I just prefer to go there as a last resort.

[CJK]

Ditch ME!

[kato2274]

Originally posted by CJK
Ditch ME!

it's not my system to hence it's not my descision to make. And considering that really not helpful advice at all

besides I think a lot of the time ME gets a bad rep anyway. when it's set up on solid high quality hardware and don't install crapware and it runs fine. techs scream about how great win2kpro is, but set that up on a pc-chips with generic power supply and the cheapest no name ram you can find then install bonzai buddy, kazzaa, AOL, gator and other crapware and see if it isn't a big PIA, one blue screen after another.

[kato2274]

well it's rebooting like a champ. as soon as it logs into windows it reboots. even does it in safe modem so I don't suspect a software problem as much . . . . . possibly a memory resident virus though. going to scan it from norton dos disk. I've swapped the memory and pulled out all extra cards, (modem and sound) no change.

the power supply is proprietary so I'm not able to swap it. the heatsink on the chip feels warm but not scolding . . . .seems about right to me.

I'll keep everyone posted. I may throw in another drive and install 98se from scratch to see if it duplicates the behavior on another drive with another OS that will definately nail it down to hardware or memory resident virus.

[CJK]

First of all...

And considering that really not helpful advice at all

My comment was my opinion taken from my experiences with ME. I really did not appreciate your comment it was very belittling, sometimes I read your replies and think that they are not helpful at all but that is my opinion and I don't need to bother you with it or put you down because of it. My reply was not intended to attack you, if you felt this way I am sorry. If you don't agree or think that I am wrong (and I am willing to accept when I am) with something, there are better and more respectful ways to say or handle it.

Second...
If you think it is your power supply, even if you cannot swap it out right now. Try hooking up a multimeter and reading the voltages.

[kato2274]

Originally posted by CJK
First of all...

My comment was my opinion taken from my experiences with ME. I really did not appreciate your comment it was very belittling, sometimes I read your replies and think that they are not helpful at all

my replies may not always be helpful, but they are usually on the crux of the problem. I don't claim to be a master troubleshooter but when someone says "hey does anyone know where I can get a ME driver for my modem" my response it not ditch ME because it's not on the crux of the problem.

I understand people have had a hard time with ME as I have as well at times and it is not my reccomended OS of choice, however when I have someone elses machine in my hands simply trashing their OS and installing something else they don't have a license for is not an option. I figured most people would know this and understand this, but appearently not.

saying ditch ME with a flaming emoticon when that clearly IS NOT an option isn't IMO trying to be helpful at all but rather just taking a shot at MS, which frankly does me no good. it would be like me taking my car in for brakes and the auto tech saying "get a new car" how does that help?

but whatever. . . .you've said your piece and I mine . . . . . bygones.

the saga continues
I don't believe at all that it's a power issue at this point. the harddrive has tested fine as has the memory and the reboot is in the same place everytime and occurs when the drive was ghosted to another one. it doesn't stay up long enough to uncheck anything from msconfig, but I can see it's been hit by Xupiter among other things and kazzaa full version is loading at startup. It does it in safe mode too so I can't regedit or msconfig from there either.

I think a dell factory restore may be in order, though I think I'm going to fdisk /mbr and perhaps install in place just to see what happens. I really think there is a bug in there loading at startup. it can stay up for several minutes running the scandisk, but once it finishes, blam reboot.

98 on another drive installed just fine and was up for over an hour, but as I said she doesn't have a license for it and I don't want to screw her dell warranty if it's still in warranty.

[NooNoo]

Just a thought, slave the drive and look through win.ini and system.ini, those you can edit easily. You could also try scanreg /fix mebbe its a dead leg that is causing a problem. You could edit the reg in dos there is a proggie here

[Ya_know]

Originally posted by kato2274
... however when I have someone elses machine in my hands simply trashing their OS and installing something else they don't have a license for is not an option. I figured most people would know this and understand this, but appearently not.

I had a guy with ME on an HP laptop with some troubles, all still under warrantee. We ended up losing a hard drive, and he had some bad memory he got from Best Buy. I would have never figured it out had I not installed 2k on the PC and figured out the memory issue, because every time I ran the ME restore, it would work OK once we replaced the hard drive, but memory slowly took its toll. I know what you are saying about the license, but some people practice differently, and the guy ended up keeping 2k anyway.

As well, I think the flame icon was there to show you what to do with ME, not to flame you...so I think this all is a misunderstanding…

[kato2274]

Originally posted by NooNoo
Just a thought, slave the drive and look through win.ini and system.ini, those you can edit easily. You could also try scanreg /fix mebbe its a dead leg that is causing a problem. You could edit the reg in dos there is a proggie here

Noo Noo to the rescue. I had been searching for a dos regedit type thing with little success. I want to kill the run form local machine. this will help me get somewhere at least.

[kato2274]

Noo,

that disk is a KEEPER. what a useful utility. thanks again

[kato2274]

anyone help me with all the run entries in the reg.

I hit hklm\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\run
and it still reboot.

I know I missing a couple

[NooNoo]

cool, if you used it on an ME machine, you might give him some feedback then?