excession

I've just put together the following system: Asus P2B-D motherboard (rev 1.06 with 1013 BIOS) Dual P3-600 Coppermines 256 (2x128) ECC PC100 Adaptec AHA-2940UW SCSI card Dual Intel Pro/100 NICs Matrox G200 AGP Antec TruPower 430 and the problem is, when running XP, the system will suddenly enter suspend mode or something similar (windows doesn't say 'preparing to stand by'), even when the system is busy (ie i'm sitting there using it). By 'suspend' I mean the following. Monitor blanks, CPU fan stops, CD-ROM light stays on (odd huh), PSU fan stays on, power light blinks. This always happens after about the same time (10mins or so, haven't timed it). It's very hard to wake it up from this state. Pressing keys does nothing. It powers off via the front switch but goes straight back to the same state when you hit the power button again. It takes a CMOS clear (or sometimes fiddling with the SMI (suspend) switch header does it. The SMI header isn't connected to a switch. I tried leaving it shorted but then the boot wouldn't continue after detecting IDE devices.) or cold power-off and leave for several hours. XP is installed non-ACPI, couldn't get it to work with ACPI even though this is a rev1.06 board. I've tried the following troubleshooting steps: Disabled power management in BIOS and in XP (already had to disable ACPI or XP wouldn't install) Changed PSU (also tried a Suntek 300W jobber) Changed BIOS battery Checked for overheating (nothing is hot to the touch, only warm) Updated BIOS Ran Windows Update Any bright ideas would be very much appreciated

Hey, Solved this! It was a case short somewhere. I noticed because i stubbed my toe on the system as it lay on the floor and it promptly dropped into the 'suspend' state. Dissasembling and reassembling with cardboard spacers below the motherboard seems to have solved the issue. Thanks for all the help! -james

Sampson: Supposedly, it's fully ACPI compliant. I'm not convinced. I'm also going to install 2000 tomorrow to see if that makes a difference. Didn't have the CD to hand today. Eventually I'm going to run OpenBSD on it, but it's often easier to troubleshoot hardware in Windows - or i suppose more accurately, if Windows is stable on it, so will everything else be

Hey. I have considered overheating, and yes, i'm running with the case open. Will try some extreme cooling I am gonna swap RAM and graphics tomorrow, and then try a IDE disk subsystem instead of SCSI. The RAM's ECC and passed memtest86 so i DOUBT that's the issue. I don't have any other Slot 1 CPUs though, i guess i could pick some cheapo ones up off eBay. It's just weird though. Crashing, yeah, can generally troubleshoot that. But when it randomly decides to suspend and won't wake up? meh! Cheers james