I have had a very daunting troubleshooting process, and I would like to
know if the "High Gurus" here agree with my analysis:
I was given the task of troubleshooting a Dell Dimension 2350 running
Windows XP SP2 that was donated to my church. The obvious problem was
random spontanious reboots. I first tried disabling "Restart on System
Failure", but no STOP errors occured at the reboots, and there was
nothing in the Event Viewer to provide any clues. And there was no
apparent pattern to the reboots, except that they seemed to happen
mostly on mouse clicks, or when a USB device was being accessed
(sometimes it happened when the system was sitting idle, though).
Then I tried swapping various components with "Known Goods": RAM, PSU,
Hard drive, etc. Problem persisted. Ran various low-level diagnostics
on the CPU, etc. No problems detected, but the reboots continued.
Since the swapping of components did not solve the problem, I have
concluded that the motherboard is bad. I believe this is corroborated
by the fact that on examining the mobo more closely, some of the
capacitors have dark blue splotches that look like leakages, and there
is a definite though nondescript smell (its rather like cinnamon rolls,
but that might be my imagination).
So would you agree that it is almost certainly the motherboard?
Dave
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