Well, my adventure on this AMD system has continued for a while. When we last left of I was going to swap out the power supply, and I did. I used a nice middle of the road Enermax 330 watt unit. Well, unfortunately that did not solve the problem.

In my deductive reasoning I walked through everything again. All issues point to bad RAM, but I changed that first, heat was not great but well within AMD’s accepted limits, power supplies could cause all kinds of flakiness yet that did not solve the issue.

Now when the system was being tested it was with XP Home edition and I was using Pro BUT my son did mention a random lockup too. I attempted to reinstall XP Home and could not even complete the install procedure, so I decided to give Red Hat 9 a whirl. Same thing, I was not even able to install the operating system, let alone test the unit.

This led me to the conclusion that either the CPU was just freaking out or the motherboard was bad, both were what I consider highly unlikely. Since I did not have a spare CPU or motherboard that supported that CPU around I decided to order another new retail box AMD Sempron 3000+ CPU, an upgrade that I could afford. Alas, this meant waiting some more time waiting.

While waiting on the new CPU, I called AMD and set up a return (RMA) for the old CPU and the day the new one came in I promptly installed it. What’s this? Two sticks of RAM? Sure enough, during the original issue somehow the original stick of RAM and the new RAM ended up back in the motherboard. Hmmm, who can I blame for that one? My son? The Little Engine that Could? Elvis? No, I had been the only one with my grubby paws on the inside of this particular computer.

Well, ok, I am already out the money and have opened the CPU package, so we are going to try that one first.