Presario UWAVE motherboard with AMD Athlon 1 GHz
Hello,
I have a Compaq Presario 5WV295 with Windows ME.
The first thing this PC did was crashing during the initial startup.
So i had to restore it from the factory files.
After some time the system became more or less stable.
This however lasted only 1 year.
In that year i have thrown away the unstable SOUNDMAX sound driver and i have replaced it by an older version of a VIA AC97 sound driver (download from
www.viaarena.com.
After that period the system started to freeze frequently with no reason, even in BIOS setup.
I have been struggeling for more than 3 years now to find the problem.
I installed Windows XP Professional, dual boot with Windows ME.
I have applied all updates and removed all virusses and spyware.
Conclusion:
The freezing is hardware related, since the BIOS setup, Windows ME and also Windows XP are freezing randomly.
I found that freezing was NOT caused by:
- The harddisk (i use a different one now).
- The 250 Watt power supply (exchanged by a 350 Watt ATX).
- The NVidia Riva 64, 32 MB video card (exchanged also).
- The memory SIMMS
- The cabling (mainly IDE cables for 2 harddisks and DVD/CD-ROM drives.
- The modem (removed)
- The LAN card (replaced)
I noticed that the AMD processor has a little damage at the corner of the core. This could cause problems, especially with the cooling.
I have remounted the processor and applied cooling pasta not only at the surface, but also a little around the edges of the processor core.
I tested a short time without a running cooling fan.
So the cooler became very hot, but the Presario did not freeze during this test. So the processor is NOT the problem.
This leaves the UWAVE (= modified FIC AZ31) motherboard as the only suspected item.
Finally i removed the motherboard again and gave it a very close inspection.
Nothing seemed to be wrong. All soldering looked very solid and nice.
However i have learned my lessons over the years. So i took a soldering iron and resoldered the power supply items on the motherboard, near the processor: the coils, the big capacitors, and the power transistors. I also renewed the soldering of the powersupply connector and IDE connectors at the motherboard.
It appeared that several pins of the powerconnector and some parts of the power supply for the AMD processor were were not soldered correctly (cold solderings). You will need a good soldering iron to apply anough heat for good soldering.
So the final conclusion is that the freezing was caused by bad solderings of the power parts at the UWAVE motherboard. Very bad Compaq quality! :dead: Now, for the first time in years, the Presario can run the whole day without any problem! But, unfortunately, it still freezes sometimes!
I hope this story can help others, who have also an unstable Compaq Presario 5000.
Regards, GSM
jobyroy said:
What is the processor on these motherboards that are freezing up?
AMD Athlon 1GhZ this one has.
I had a friend I thought I would do a favor and look at his presario 5000 for this same problem. After freezing up several times and then not coming back on, I replaced the motherboard.
The board I replaced it with came with a AMD Duron. It came up for about a minute and then the processor popped and smoked.