In all my years of Information Technology....

I've never come across this problem before, I was repairing an old computer running Windows 2000 Professional, and it was exhibiting some rather strange behaviour... it would just hang mid anything no rhyme or reason to it ... "Ahhh" I thought it's memory related, so I whipped out the memory and put some new memory in ... still it hung unpredictably ...."Bugger" I thought.... "time to bring out the big guns..... DIAGNOSTICS !!"

so I beasted it with diagnostics to within an inch of it's useful life and low and behold it passed everything, not once, not twice but well over thirty times without so much as a blip or error.... "Hmmmm" I thought "This isn't playing fair at all" .... but the second it saw an operating system (any operating system, be that XP,Linux or W2k) it hung like a dead thing......weird .....

So I removed the hard drive and put it into a completely brand new working PC... it hung again immediately..."Ahhhh" I thought "it's the hard drive locking up" .... so I put a new hard drive in the Dinosaur PC and started to install Windows 2000 Professional..... it hung about half way through !!!.... "Ahhh" I thought "it's the motherboard AND the hard drive" .... to cut a very long story short and much cursing and shouting at inanimate bits of IT paraphernalia.... I ended up building a brand new PC and copying the data across and re-installing everything on pristine hardware.... only then was I satisfied that I had got over the problem...

But that's what bothered me.... because I hadn't been able to identify/fix what was actually failing.... it was/is the most bizarre problem I have ever encountered, I haven't ruled out that the dinosaur was having multiple organ failure on several components, which would account for the fault moving when presented with new hardware... but I have to say this one stumped me and that doesn't happen often, I can usually tell what is wrong with a PC within a few minutes/seconds of looking at it.... but not this one !!!!

No doubt I will dig out the offending hardware at some point and get to the bottom of it !!