standby without warning (win 2k sp 4)

The OS is a stand-alone Win 2K Pro with SP 4 and DirectX 9.0c. An AMD Athlon XP is mounted on Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe. (This thing has a crappy CMOS clock!) The unit has a half Gig of SDRAM. The Award BIOS shows most Power Management disconnected. There is a 1:1 transformer, an APC, and a generic surge protector on the input. The motherboard is running about 30C - the CPU a little over 50C. Primary voltages are less than +/- 6 percent of expected and do not appear to fluctuate to any great degree. (Changes seem measured in a couple hundredths volt.) Nor, absent a total power failure, does the incoming line voltage seem to vary much over time. The unit has various logical drives. Although some parts of a decade old, the current arrangement and has been together for about two years.

The OS was recently reloaded. Difficulties began before the reload. Before the current problems, the combination of software and hardware had proved to be highly stable.

Sometimes the green idiot (power) light on the front of the chassis will blink. At other times, it does not. Whether the green light is blinking or not, there is an occassional but annoying abrupt standby warning followed by black screen computer lockup. The lockups don't seem associated with any particular observable event or user action. Sometimes, nothing is happening until there is a warning that the computer is going on standby. (In other words, I can't make the lockups happen.) The lockups always freeze the cursor, but not the keyboard.

If the system can be brought back up, there is a warning to switch to battery power. The unit will warm reboot immediately. Repeated scans with Norton Internet Security and Spybot reveal no problems. Also, at times, the unit has trouble coming back to life. When the OS comes up, sometimes applications won't launch and Task Manager produces a Swiss cheese video display, with only the frame of the Quick Launch appearing on the screen. A reboot is necessary. At other times, things come back to normal without difficulty.

If the computer is intentionally put on standby, which I simply tired once to see what would happen, the cursor freezes when the screen reappears and the computer has to be rebooted.

 

Never changed the battery in on this board or my last one. Since Day One, the clock has kept reasonable time as long as the computer is idle. Variations in time seem associated with application use. I've never had the inclination to find the battery and replace it. I just click About Time and let it correct the error. The clock is seldom over a minute or two off. With the last board, I got used to time fluctuations of 10s of milliseconds rather than 10s of thousands of milliseconds.