I got an old compaq 5102AU PC (via a customer upgrade), and I decided to upgrade it to XP once I got a customer requesting a cheap PC.

Anyway, I installed XP, but found I had to upgrade the 128Mb RAM to 256MB (to make it useable).

Once I had it fully upgraded, I noticed that it seemed very slow for a 1.0 Ghz Athlon. I also noticed that the HDD light was flashing a lot, and the cpu usage was low. That points to a HDD problem.

The HDD was a 20GB seagate… one of the older ones in a rubber “glove”… I’ve always wondered why seagate would do such a thing to a HDD.

To me, a HDD has moving parts… moving parts = friction… friction = heat… and heat needs to be dissipated somehow… and rubber is a good insulator… so: put some rubber around a hdd, and you will get high temperatures; and a short HDD life.

So, I image the HDD onto an old 20GB maxtor, but it then refuses to boot in the compaq (read error).

Next: image onto a newer 40GB HDD: this time I don’t get a read error, just a blank screen.

I try changing the RAM, but it has no effect.

I read somewhere, that the bios can sometimes be a problem. So I start looking for a bios upgrade. I also decide to clear the CMOS…

Clearing the CMOS finally stuffed things up. After that, booting would give a cmos checksum error, load default cmos settings, then go into the bios, and then the cursor would “automatically” scroll to the last menu item. the screen would flicker occasionally, and trying to move the cursor away would last a second, before it got moved back to the bottom menu item (save settings).

I save the settings, but another reboot gets me the same screen.

I remove all peripherals but the problem is still there… I even try replacing the PSU.

Looks like the motherboard is faulty… I’ve wasted enough time on this… So I toss the mobo (but keep the CPU… it could come in useful).