[PLUG] Intrusion detection on desktop

[Tim]

Hi Denis,

I just caught up on the previous thread.  Here are the things I would
encourage you to consider looking into if you continue to have
problems.  Yes many of these were already mentioned, but hopefully I'm
providing a few new tips:

- Flakey PSU.  Definitely the source of a lot of problems.  In the
past I've been able to determine this sometimes by looking my BIOS
diagnostic screens and see the volt meter readings for each component
of power.  Often you'll see things like "5V" and next to it "4.93V"
which is the reading from the PSU.  I've seen PSUs give output that's
clearly outside of tolerance before.  Your system will still "work",
but weird things can happen.


- Bad Caps.  Your mobo is fairly old so it is certainly possible that
some of your capacitors are going bad.  A while back a whole bunch of
motherboards and other components were shipped with faulty capacitors.
See:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

Check your capacitors for any bulging.  If you see it, then the cap is
going bad.  My brother discovered this in his monitor a while back
when it went out on him.  He was able to repair the monitor by simply
replacing the caps.


- Run a memtest.  Just to make sure there's no memory seating
problems or a variety of power problems, try running memtest86+ on it
or something similar.


Hope that helps,
tim



On Sat, Jun 07, 2014 at 01:40:38PM -0700, Denis Heidtmann wrote:
> I had posted earlier that random chassis intrusion halts during boot
> prompted me to change the CMOS battery.  A mysterious failure to
> start, solved by the passage of time, occurred before I got the
> battery out.  That mystery remains.  The battery has been replaced.  I
> am hoping for no more intrusion halts.
> 
> Galen suggested measuring the current through the intrusion jumper
> might help illuminate the random halts. I have measured that current
> as best I could.  It appears to be about 0.1uA, the least count of my
> Fluke 87.
> 
> I calculate that the CR2032 should last 250 years at this current, so
> I do not know why it is set so low.  10 uA would be too high, yielding
> only 2.5 years battery life.
> 
> Thursday night I was asked what my system was.  The MB is an ASUS
> M3N78-VM put into service June 2009.  The CPU is an Athalon X2 4850e
> 2.5 Ghz.  I have 2G RAM and a SATA 500G HD.
> 
> Is this as outdated as some of Thursday night quizzers thought it might be?
> 
> -Denis
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