First off, thanks for the support for this TOT thread :-)
However it looks like I was mistaken as to the cause being the mini PCI
bay and/or its cards. Yesterday I needed to open an Excel file. The
only way for me to do that is with a bootable Linux CD which has
OpenOffice on it.
Now Linux is *very* chatty when it boots which makes a bootable CD a
very useful diagnostic. Anyway, one of the things it tells you is the
processor speed - which was very low 167 MHz. I plugged in the AC
charger and rebooted. This time it said a higher figure as expected,
670 MHz but not the full speed of the CPU 850MHz. Then I recalled that
in my messing about one of the things I tried was disabling the Intel
Speedstep. So I turned it from disabled back to automatic. Within
minutes the box had crashed. I tried again with a setting of always max
but that too crashed.
I then tried again with disabled but with the offending network card,
as I thought, installed. No crash. Put back the card drivers and it is
still going. So it looks like the speedstep. Google tells me others
have had problems with this and also disable.
torna alla lista