Okay… so the magic smoke may have escaped. Dell Xps 8500 hung on the bios splash. New battery, no dice. Air dusting and remove re arrange memory sticks… no dice. Bought new computer… noticed keyboard was no imput. Dang! Grumble grumble… Okay, so, plug stuff back in, attempt to start. passes to option to boot menus/bios reset to default. grumble. New cup of coffee, notice was using wrong keyboard and mouse combo. Reassemble and manage after few “continues” to get it to boot. Have to restart several times to get all the little icons and programs that spool up to go… Computer sluggish.
How many boot ups does the poor thing have left? And if I did want to get a new mother board how in the heck do I know what size to order… and is there an easy way to figure out how to cut all the bloat programs that add on as computers age and whack them back into lean and mean??
Maybe… last current on hardware software about @ commodore amiga. Not familiar with linux at all. I did get to windows, and it does run, just seems really slow. Web wisdom is talking bad capacitors on the mother board, bad chipsets, and I’ve had bad luck with memory. The computers performance has been dropping even after bloatware/malware removals.
First you’ve got the Dell XPS 8500, then you bought a new computer, and then you’re asking how many boot ups does the poor thing have. So how old is the computer in question?
As for motherboards they’re either made to a certain size standard, or custom. Generally with Dells they make a lot of their own stuff, so it’s likely to be a custom motherboard. If you’re talking about replacing the motherboard, you’re really talking about replacing the entire computer, since anything old enough to have it’s motherboard replaced probably is old enough to scrap.
As for sluggishness, it depends on when it’s happening. General rule of thumb is that windows itself accumulates crap in a lot of odd places, and every so often it makes sense to just reinstall the OS.
Tiffany’s suggestion of a linux stick is a good one. That removes a lot of different possible problems with the OS. However if it’s hanging at the BIO flash, you’ve got a hardware problem. Next time it happens check for an error code or something to indicate what the issue is.
Man, its only 5 years old. That makes it a computersaur. The thing that is killing me is my bookmarks list. And having to remember all the passwords for things like google docs
Yeah, I’d rather save the old drive and all the programs I’ve downloaded. Grumble.
I did not manage to write down the error code, and it runs… but seems to be dog slow. But then my kid does do all the browser games and malware purge is a frequent ritual.
Ah, well… maybe time to look into cases, boards, and an new build. Maybe get one of those fancy quad processor boards and pack on dog ancient i3’s
I’ve got a few 5 year old systems floating around, they’ve been fine for what I use them for, Home Theater PC and Netflix. I also upgraded them with SSDs, which fixes a lot of sins, and you can get them for less than $100. Downside is it’s best if you install the OS onto them, which means you need to start from scratch.
