[ale] Losing stability

[Charles Shapiro]

My main box at home is having Serious Troubles.  On startup it often will
hang (no screen output) with the CD light lit steady until I press & hold
the "off" switch to retry. Other behaviors include appearing to start up and
then emitting random beeps through the speaker with no screen output, or
giving random core dumps on various scripts in /etc/init.d.  I've also
experienced  spontaneous reboots and random hangs/program failures in X
windows.  The "memory speed" number given in the initial startup screen
sometimes changes from boot-up to boot-up as well.  The system is a
home-brew about 4 years old and lightly used; leadtek WinFast K-series MB,
athlon chip, cheap simple video card, single 512 MB DRAM stick. Processor
temperatures appear to be within acceptable ranges, at least according to
the "syshealth" part of the BIOS. I've enabled the full memory test in the
POST, but so far that hasn't picked up any problems.

I'm thinking that the problem is either memory or motherboard. I've removed,
air-blasted, and re-seated the memory stick in a new slot without change in
behavior. At  this point I'm considering getting some new memory and, if
that doesn't change the behavior, replacing the motherboard.

Does this seem reasonable? The clock appears steady, so I'm assuming the
BIOS battery is OK, but perhaps that's a factor?

-- CHS
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