a friend of the family has a PC with problems. maybe you can help? it's a 2 year old pentium III (socket) with 128 megs PC133 RAM and an ATI rage 128 video card. the PC was running winME and then it started resetting itself randomly. all parts inside the PC (except mobo,processor, and possibly power supply) were swapped by someone else with no change. I tried to install win2k on it. halfway though the format it would reset. after copying the files to the hard disk, it would boot then somewhere in the boot sequence it would reset again. motherboard (last component not to be swapped out along with procesor itself) was replaced with a Gigabyte one. PC stops resetting at random. I think the problem is solved. I install win2k on it. after installing, the OS wants to detect the hardware. at the same point every time in the hardware detection (after PC has successfully booted into win2k), the screen goes black then fills with text (ASCII, screen is now in text mode, no longer graphics mode). it's all commas or something. I think maybe WIN2K doesn't like the ATI rage 128? I reinstalled win2k, no change. power supply is swapped, just to make sure it's not some power fluctuation. no change. win98SE installed, works fine. however, graphics card drivers not yet installed, works in VGA mode. I dunno what will happen when graphics card drivers are installed (although this seems unrelated to the original reset problem) what could the problem be? I assume the original reset problem was a motherboard problem and now it's fixed, but why could the win2k hardware detect crash? the person who swapped various parts before me also installed windows XP. windows XP installed fine, didn't solve the reset problem but didn't choke on the hardware detect either...

Use an air compressor and blow your board.