HP Pavillion 8260

[Nixona]

I'm having some problems with an 8260, and of course HP offers no more tech support than it takes to sell the thing. It's a PII-266 w/ 32mb of RAM, some sort of ATI Video card looking like an 8mb, Iomega Zip 100, and a 10/100 NIC used for Cable Modem. From the user description, I got that it was unstable, slow, and when they tried to "tweak" it, it ended up crashed. They played with the HP Restore CD, and then I came into the picture. I got a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) or two when I was playing with it earlier, put up a fresh format and an install of Win98, and I get Windows Protection Errors on the reboot of installing Windows. Doesnt seem to be any other time..but that's beginning to bother me. Anybody have any idea? No overclocking...What I'd really like is a layout of the board so I can check the voltages and settings, it's a **** intel cloned BX440 something or other, I cant tell HP is plastered all over everything. Nothing in the bios, just the old-skool jumpers. http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif Whenever I turn up my celeron without enough juice I get protection errors, and have seen them with overclocking and some corrupted files, but not on a fresh format like this with not even a thought of overclocking. Also, I would look at cooling, but it's near impossible. They have mounted a large heatsink on the processor, and have a "wind tunnel" kinda thing, a plastic rectangular tube that comes from the case fan in back to the heatsink. It CANT move much air, I'm going to let it run for a couple hours tonight, and open it up and check some temperatures, but I cant get that tube off, I dont want to break it. Any help would be appreciated here guys, just thoughts and opinions.

[BEOR999]

http://www.hp.com/cposupport/prodhome/pv8260.html

Note, the board Chipset is Intel 440LX AGPset
not the BX you stated?
Supported Operation Systems (OS/NOS)Microsoft Windows 95, so Win 98 drivers may not be 'good enough' for this product, I would suggest recovery with Win95 disk supplied, to restore the correct drivers, then check the link I gave to update your drivers.

Note the errors at boot, post them here and I will have a look for you. But most, I think will be data corruption in the memory address.

[tkray]

Pull the network card and reboot the machine. That should take care of the protect error. Get a new driver for the video, and get a different NIC, preferably an ISA as opposed to PCI.

Let me know if this doesn't work.

[Nixona]

Pulling the NIC helps me in no way...It's not even the customer's, it's rented from AT&T along with the Cable modem. I've gotten around THAT particular situation anyway. I told the customer they could use a RAM Upgrade, from 32 to something more. They bought another 32 mb PC100 Dimm from Best Buy, and now when I install it, I get either 16 mb or 48 mb reported RAM. Then when it goes on to boot windows, I get another protection error. It boots fine with just the original 32mb in there, but with just the new one it reports 16 mb. It's an Intel board..it should be able to support it shouldn't it? Man..I thought compaqs were bad. I'm going to work on changing out some RAM from some I have laying around..Is it because they are not a matched pair, or is one of the DIMM's flaky? Sorry, 440LX, HP has slim to no technical support, well, not like when you build it yourself and know it inside and out. And all the patches I saw didnt seem to really apply to anything I have.

[Richard_Cranium72]

The dimmms don't have to be matched, edo and fpm do, maybe some others. HP's are wierd, my 6350 has been a bitter pill. On the heatsink, mine was made of some type tin foil, removed it and put in a $12 unit and now it's much quieter. You said you re-installed the win98, did ya use a 98 disc or hp's? The HP mobo is "tatooed" some **** HP uses to make it accept those pissy restore discs, much like compac and lots of others. Also have ya been to the hp forum? Sometimes other owners will have some help. I've re-formatted sixteen times in 20 months, now my machine won't take the restore disc, I'm not fooling with it for a little while. ON general win98 errors, Nathan has a great links page to MS, www.ehelpfree.com/nathan (http://www.ehelpfree.com/nathan) hope this helps some, DrVette

[alien_from_io]

Check in BIOS for parity check, disable if enabled when using mismatched sticks. Take me to your leader.

[tkray]

Blame AT&T, and have them come fix it

http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif Just kidding.
Last time I had this problem, I was installing a NIC for a customer, and removing it physically cleared the problem, I installing another brand of NIC in the same slot, and it cleared up. Is it possible the AT&T tech moved cards that were already present around to install the NIC?
At this point I'd be inclined to remove all non essential cards, and add them one at a time.