so i almost crapped my pants last night

i'm sitting around playing some bf1942. just a normal night at home when out of nowhere my screen turns to fuzz and my comp locks up. ok thats weird so i reboot load windows, and open event viewer to try to figure out what happened. curious if my psu was not up to par with all the hardware i'm running i bring up mbm dashboard take a ss and bam, black screen lockup.


scared now i unplug every drive except my boot drive. still nothing. i swap my 2x512mb mushkin 3200 for a single stick of generic pc2100 which i had in my system while the mushkin was on rma. power up and can't get past post screen. ok so i clear cmos. nothing, switch ram back and clear cmos, nothing. now i'm getting really scared as i have sold most of my spare rig in the classys so if i can't get it to work i'm sorta screwed.

i take my system out to my shop and rip all the wires out.

plugin the cpu hsf, and vcard hsf and still nothing. swap ram 3-4 more times, nothing. still can't get past post screen.

i try putting the pc2100 in one last time and notice something feels weird. i pull it out and 1 transister is stuck to my finger and 3-5 more are already gone. great i'm thinking no wonder my comp has been finicky lately. i grab a flashlight and examine the ram slots to see if the missing transistors are in the ram slots causing it to not boot. nope clean as a whistle.


luckily i haven't sold the cpu/mobo from my spare rig yet so i toss my barton in my old mobo and it loads up just fine. sigh of relief.
i toss my old 1800+ in my nf7 and it works. another sigh of relief.

i haven't put the barton back in the nf7 but i think it will work now.

i have a feeling the missing transisters landed on the mobo somewhere and got knocked off when i took it to my shop.


so i start examining the evil pc2100 and notice all i have to do its lightly run my finger across the pcb and transisters pop right off. i was about to snap it in half but decided to wait til i get my cam back to video the destruction of such an evil peice of harware.

since i was tired last night (it was about 2am when this happened) i left the 1800 in my system and so far all seems well. its running nice and stable. a little slower for obvious reasons but stable which is all that matters.


this happened at the worst possible time. i just won an auction on ebay for a chieftec dragon server case and had to borrow the money from mom to pay for it. i am selling off the last bits of my spare rig to pay for it, so dead hardware is NOT what i needed.

but everything seems to work and i'm back on track. just needed to vent my little horror story from last night. thank god its over.

I think you mean resistors. The little rectangular things with solder at both ends right?

Cheaper rarely equals better

Transistors is not the word your looking for. More like capacitors and resistors like qualhiveldorf mentioned.

resistors is the word i was looking for.

That board must have been in a world of hurt then.

when i was testing everything i thought for sure my mobo was toast but all my hardware seems to work fine thankfully. well everything but my hd but thats a different issue. the solder points on the resistors just seem to have worn out. i'm suprised my comp ran so long. there had to be missing resistors long before i noticed them. i'd been using that stick of ram for about 2 weeks while my mushkin was being rma'd. guess i found a new reason to like heatspreaders.



matrixzen check your pms

I'm guessing it must have been running very hot which might have contributed to it. If you turn off your computer at night then it would probably be even worse due to solder point contraction and expansion.

People turn their computers off?