Marginal old system

[sea22]

I have an old system, an eMachine 400, with a new power supply (3 months old). It has worked well for a long time (many years). Everything is backup on two (duplicate) 80G drives. It is a very modest system; it uses W98SE. The Ram was doubled a few years ago. Otherwise it is all original equipment. The floppy drive doesn't work, but that is not a problem.

Recently, it has gotten harder to start up. I have to press the start button again and again, but finally it starts up.

Also after running for awhile now, it freezes – the screen is OK, the pointer is frozen, the on/off button does not work. I then unplug it, plug it back in and then start it up – and it then runs for a hour or so – sometimes for hours.

I do not need an upgrade as this unit satisfies everything that I need. However I will get a new one shortly as my main computer – but I would still like to have the old one usable offline.

In any case, I am not sure what is happening to my system. Any advice would be welcome. Thanks.

Sea22

Bobby1986 -- thanks for the input. For the moment, the problems seem to have vanished. Sea22

 

[BoBBYI986]

Hi, check your power switch behind the power button on your case could be jammed or completely missing the power switch, that could be one reason why it takes so many attemps to start up the machine. Also for your feezing issues run Memtest86 to check for RAM errors could be a module of ram that has gone faulty. If no luck with any of that then its most likely motherboard.