I have done a great deal of troubleshooting and I have concluded that bad capacitors are the most likely cause of my continued problems.
Here is the history;
1. Purchased a Medion Titanium MD 8000 XL from Aldi in November of 2002. It was a great buy at the time. My brother bought the same system a couple of weeks after me.
2. Over the course of the next 2 years and 9 months the system operated well and I added memory to take it from the original 256 MB to 512 then 1 GB, and also added a DVD burner and a larger hard drive.
3. Some time in late 2004 my brother started experiencing some issues with his Medion and he found the bad cap information on the Internet and opened his system and sure enough he could visibly indentify some bad caps. He is in the electronics business and replaced them himself but only 4 or 5 that he felt needed to be replaced because there were close to other power related components. He also replaced his power supply because he felt that it was under sized for the system. I didn't agree with him about the power supply. I opened my system and inspected the capacitors, including the ones on the inside of the power supply. They all looked fine and I wasn't having any problems.
3. Around July of 2005 I started getting BSODs, with "stop" messages that were erractic as to cause, but they were relatively infrequent, probably once every 2 weeks. I suspected it was a driver issue. I did run a memory test for over 12 hours from a bootable CD and concluded that it wasn't memory.
4. I have troubleshoot these BSODs for about three months now and finally have concluded that it is not a Windows driver issue and it is not overheating. After running a diagnostic Linux boot CD and doing diagnostics with that, I concluded that the problem is hardware and most likely bad capacitors because I found one capacitor with a slight bulge in it. All the other capacitors look fine. BTW, the Linux diagnostic boot CD was dowloaded from here http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ . When I ran the Lucifer system stress test I received errors but there was virtually no information as to what the errors were and my system got hot enough (checked with PC Wizard 2006) that I wondered if overheating could be the problem. The errors took a half an hour to start occurring and there weren't many of them. I couldn't find any information about Lucifer so I tried running some CPU stress tests with my case open and a large fan blowing directly into the open case. That didn't produce any errors but I only ran them for a short time before I switched to memory testing using Memtest86+. This did produce errors, not a great amount though, and at that point I did some more research. That research has led me to believe that replacing my capacitors is my best bet. If that doesn't work, then the power supply will get replaced. At that point if the problems still exist then this motherboard is destined for retirement.
I will keep this thread updated, as the whole process has been time consuming and frustrating. If I can save some people from the same frustration and time, it will make me feel better.
BTW, I called MSI's tech support and mentioned "bad capacitors" and they issued me an RMA after I provided my serial number. After holding my MB for 8 business days (so I was without it for 16 days total), MSI returned it and said they couldn't fix it because it was a MB manufactured for Medion. I called them and complained vehemently that they shouldn't have issued an RMA. MSI claim that they don't have information to differentiate between OEM boards and boards they sell under their MSI brand. I told them that they should have that information and why did it take 8 business days for them to return my motherboard! The person I was speaking to was not fluent in English and I decided I was wasting my time.
Here is the history;
1. Purchased a Medion Titanium MD 8000 XL from Aldi in November of 2002. It was a great buy at the time. My brother bought the same system a couple of weeks after me.
2. Over the course of the next 2 years and 9 months the system operated well and I added memory to take it from the original 256 MB to 512 then 1 GB, and also added a DVD burner and a larger hard drive.
3. Some time in late 2004 my brother started experiencing some issues with his Medion and he found the bad cap information on the Internet and opened his system and sure enough he could visibly indentify some bad caps. He is in the electronics business and replaced them himself but only 4 or 5 that he felt needed to be replaced because there were close to other power related components. He also replaced his power supply because he felt that it was under sized for the system. I didn't agree with him about the power supply. I opened my system and inspected the capacitors, including the ones on the inside of the power supply. They all looked fine and I wasn't having any problems.
3. Around July of 2005 I started getting BSODs, with "stop" messages that were erractic as to cause, but they were relatively infrequent, probably once every 2 weeks. I suspected it was a driver issue. I did run a memory test for over 12 hours from a bootable CD and concluded that it wasn't memory.
4. I have troubleshoot these BSODs for about three months now and finally have concluded that it is not a Windows driver issue and it is not overheating. After running a diagnostic Linux boot CD and doing diagnostics with that, I concluded that the problem is hardware and most likely bad capacitors because I found one capacitor with a slight bulge in it. All the other capacitors look fine. BTW, the Linux diagnostic boot CD was dowloaded from here http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ . When I ran the Lucifer system stress test I received errors but there was virtually no information as to what the errors were and my system got hot enough (checked with PC Wizard 2006) that I wondered if overheating could be the problem. The errors took a half an hour to start occurring and there weren't many of them. I couldn't find any information about Lucifer so I tried running some CPU stress tests with my case open and a large fan blowing directly into the open case. That didn't produce any errors but I only ran them for a short time before I switched to memory testing using Memtest86+. This did produce errors, not a great amount though, and at that point I did some more research. That research has led me to believe that replacing my capacitors is my best bet. If that doesn't work, then the power supply will get replaced. At that point if the problems still exist then this motherboard is destined for retirement.
I will keep this thread updated, as the whole process has been time consuming and frustrating. If I can save some people from the same frustration and time, it will make me feel better.
BTW, I called MSI's tech support and mentioned "bad capacitors" and they issued me an RMA after I provided my serial number. After holding my MB for 8 business days (so I was without it for 16 days total), MSI returned it and said they couldn't fix it because it was a MB manufactured for Medion. I called them and complained vehemently that they shouldn't have issued an RMA. MSI claim that they don't have information to differentiate between OEM boards and boards they sell under their MSI brand. I told them that they should have that information and why did it take 8 business days for them to return my motherboard! The person I was speaking to was not fluent in English and I decided I was wasting my time.
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