alfei

Thanks for the suggestions. I've never run with a different CPU (been wanting to upgrade to an AthlonXP-Barton but the prices keep going UP) but about a year ago I upgraded my CPU heatsink/fan. I removed the CPU and cleaned the surface (thermal compound was dried out) and applied new thermal compound in the process. The problem, though, has always happened as far as I can remember. Also, I've never overclocked this system. That upgrade was for heat concerns (after I started using MBM) and included adding a case fan or two. Since then, I've been more careful about keeping power & other cables neat to improve air circulation inside the case. I have a desktop case which was chosen based on physical space requirements in my apartment before I paid any attention to heat build up. It seems the more monitors I have (MBM, now WinXp logs) the more there is to worry about .

Just a quick update to my previous post. I did some more experimenting and the McCaffee startup problem may not be directly related to the "machine checks". I only get McCaffee errors on an absolute cold bootup (as described). The machine checks appear in the log on *every* cold bootup, even if the power was off for only 10 seconds and no McCaffee errors show up. alfei

I've been running my AMD Duron 1100 / Gigabyte GA-7VAX (VIA KT-400 chipset) for a couple years now, through several peripheral hardware upgrades (disk, cdrom, cpu and case fans, etc.) and have always had the same problem. I just upgraded to WinXP so I can now see the event log messages ("Machine Check" and "Machine Check:Regs" repeated 4 times) but the appearance of the problem for me was the same under Win98SE. It only ever seemed to happen under absolute "cold" bootup. This means leaving the PC off for a long time (like overnight). Never happened on a reset/reboot or even complete power off and power on after a few minutes. Also, if I cold booted and went into the bios setup for a minute to let the system "warm up" the problem didn't happen. Under both Win98 and also XP, the most regular appearance was McCaffee Virus scan startup reporting "corrupt signature files" or something similar. XP sometimes reports some other errors too (i.e., corrupt registry recovered). The problem always goes away after rebooting. A 2nd reboot is sometimes, but usually not needed. I always suspected the power supply but I upgraded that and the problem still happened. I also suspected a mechanical (thermal) contact issue but I've seated/unseated/reseated cards, cpu, cables many times through many upgrades and still the same problem. Once the system warms up and boots cleanly, never a problem. No memory test or cpu test ever indicated a problem. Actually, now that I have XP, my system boots up much more quickly and the dreaded scandisk that used to take forever seems to be much rarer so it's become much less of an annoyance for me. Still, like everyone else here, I'd like to know what's actually causing these machine checks and whether it's really ok to simply ignore them (suppress in registry)? And does anyone know what type of processing McCaffee viruscan might do at initialization that causes it to see this problem when everything else going on at boot up seems to be ok? alfei