My first bit of meddling has resulted in disaster..... Last night I replaced my Cyrix MII 300 processor with an AMD K62 300. The motherboard is a GVC FR500 which should support it. However, when I booted the machine up the chip was recognised, the drives detected and I could get into the BIOS but when booting reached the next screen which displays 'Verifying DMI pool data....' it just hung. I thought it may be that the BIOS needing updating, as I don't think the K62 was inproduction when the board first came out, so I switched the processors back, reset the BIOS to the default settings and rebooted. Exactly the same thing happened and the screen just hangs at the verification bit. Is my machine dead or just dying? I really need to sort this out as it is the only machine I have and I'm an impoverished student and can't really afford to replace components as they are still pretty expensive here in the UK. Not only that but my girlfriend is giving me the 'I told you not to interfere with it routine.... nag, nag etc' and she's driving me nuts........ Hope someone can help Barry

Sountd like a hardware problem. It appears to be bad RAM. Try reseating RAM and see if it fix the problem. Then check your HDD.

This is a really nasty problem that seems to be all too common. Here is a page of suggestions from Maxtor on how to approach it. Unfortunately I cannot tell you I have seen any successes so far. Please report back on anything you might learn: DMI Hang ups

Git rid of yer girlfriend! No more naggin'.