Go into your bios and turn off the L1 and L2 cache, try running
seti@home from your floppy, if it still doesn't run try
UNDERclocking your CPU / RAM one step at a time and running
from the floppy. If at any point you wind up with Seti@home
in a working condition then your CPU or RAM is most likely damaged.


"Kirsten" <kirsten@setihome.dk> wrote in message
news:620f3c2d.0308110714.54e1c51b@posting.google.com...

gheston@hiwaay.net (Gary Heston) wrote in message

news:<vjdkiccs7r9fa4@corp.supernews.com>...

In article <620f3c2d.0308101059.525cb9a5@posting.google.com>,
Kirsten <kirsten@setihome.dk> wrote:

cut..

- it was a periodical failure in the beginning, now
it's there all the time: if I start SETI@home as commandline in a
"dos" window, via SETISpy, or as a screen saver it's the same result:
a crash after 10-60 seconds. I've tested different commandline
versions I had on store.

  [ ... ]

That's a classic symptom of the CPU getting hot; go get Motherboard
Monitor 5 or a similar product, install it, see what your CPU temp
is before starting SETI, then watch it when you start SETi. I'll bet
it climbs rapidly beyond 70C, then the system shuts down.

I would believe that too, if the crash happened a little longer than
0,5 second after SETI is executed. I don't have time to read anything
at all. SETI og Prime95 shuts it all down in a split second - also I
made this floppy disk with Linux, so I wouldn't need a hard disk to
run SETI - chaboomb - the machine crashes.

The cure is a larger heatsink/fan assembly installed with a good
thermal compount--I prefer Artic Silver or Artic Alumina--and better
case ventilation. Get more fans blowing into the case than blowing out.

Okay, I should remember to make cirkulation in the case. It's not very
varm IMO: around 44-48 degr. C (cpu fan) and 32-38 degr. C (case). I
still suspect (hope?) it's the PSU going down bit by bit. If it's the
CPU fan, it's not so bad neither (money wise), if it's the CPU :(

Thanks for your help. Greetings from
Kirsten
founder of http://setihome.dk (just in Danish)