On 03/10/2011 15:18, Dave Headley wrote:

I managed to borrow a processor that was known to be good - lo and
behold, everything works as it should with that in place. I have a copy
of PC Check and when I ran processor diagnostics it passed all tests (as
can be seen here
http://s137.photobucket.com/albums/q...ckard%20Bell/?
action=view&current=SAM_0613.jpg). I can only conclude that that
software is not really worth having and I've learnt something by this
experience.

There are loads of test programs out there, and a surprising number are
actually quite poor at finding real world problems.

Thanks to all who offered support and advice

Thanks for letting us know the outcome. It was beginning to sound like
it was definitely hardware related. While CPU failures are far less
common than motherboard failures, they do happen sometimes (quite often
triggered by fan failure or slowdown).


--
Cheers,

John.

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